
Qasg L f\ VI 7 



The Cambridge Manuals of Science and 
Literature 



LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL 
UNIVERSITY 



CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

i^tttum: FETTER LANE, E.C. 

C. F. CLAY, Manager 



m 


t.% 


m, 


\ * I Hi 


1*1 


a§§H *■••* 


•-■■}_ j 



«fimburflh: 100 PRINCES STREET 
$cdm : A. ASHER AND CO. 
Iktysifl: F. A. BROCKHAUS 

iictufork: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
$ombau anb Calcutta : MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. 



All rights reserved 






















Opfl 



SI 







The Student's Progress 

(From Gregor Reisch's Margarita pliilosophica, Edition of 1504, Strassburg) 



^ ■ 



VI 






• With the exception of the coat of arms at 
the foot, the design on the title page is a 
reproduction of one used by the earliest known 
Cambridge printer, John Siberch, I 5 2 I 



NOTE ON THE FRONTISPIECE 

In this picture the schoolboy is seen arriving with his satchel 
and being presented with a hornbook by Nicostrata, the Latin 
muse Carmentis, who changed the Greek alphabet into the 
Latin. She admits him by the key of congruitas to the House 
of Wisdom (" Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn 
out her seven pillars," Proverbs ix. 1). In the lowest story he 
begins his course in Donatus under a Bachelor of Arts armed 
with the birch ; in the next he is promoted to Priscian. Then 
follow the other subjects of the Trivium and the Quadrivium, 
each subject being represented by its chief exponent— logic by 
Aristotle, arithmetic by Boethius, geometry by Euclid, etc. 
Ptolemy, the philosopher, who represents astronomy, is con- 
fused with the kings of the same name. Pliny and Seneca 
represent the more advanced study of physical and of moral 
science respectively, and the edifice is crowned by Theology, 
the long and arduous course for which followed that of the 
Arts. Its representative in a medieval treatise is naturally 
Peter Lombard. 



NOTE 

I wish to express my obligations to many recent 
writers on University history, and to the editors of 
University Statutes and other records, from which 
my illustrations of medieval student life have been 
derived. I owe special gratitude to Dr Hastings 
Rashdall, Fellow of New College and Canon of 
Hereford, my indebtedness to whose great work, 
The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 
is apparent throughout the following pages. Dr 
Rashdall has been good enough to read my proof- 
sheets, and to make valuable criticisms and sug- 
gestions, and the Master of Emmanuel has rendered 
me a similar service. 

R. S. R. 

23rd January 1912. 



CONTENTS 



Chapter I — Introductory 

Chaucer and the Medieval Student — The Great Period of Univer- 
/ sity-Founding — The words "Universitas," "Collegium," 
" Studium Generale" — Bologna — Growth of Studia Generalia 
— Paris, Oxford, Cambridge — Definition of " Universitas " 



Chapter II — Life in the Student-Universities 

Student-Guilds at Bologna — " Nations " — The College of Doctors — 
Relations with the City — Position of an English Law Student 
at Bologna, and his relations to his Nation and his Universitas 
— The Office of Rector —Powers of the University over Citizens 
— The Degradation of the Bologna Masters — Examinations — 
The Doctorate — Regulations — Padua — Limitations of the 
Rector's Powers at Florence — Spanish Universities — Married 
Dons 13 



Chapter III — The Universities of Masters 

Early History of the University of Paris — Faculties — "Nations" — 
Struggle with the Chancellor — Position of the Rector — Oxford 
— "Nations" — The Proctors — University Jurisdiction — Ger- 
many — Scotland 41 



Chapter IV — College Discipline 

Origin of the College System— Merton — Imitations of the Merton 
Rule — New College — Increase in Number of Regulations — 
Latin- Speaking — Conversation in Hall — Meals — College Rooms 
— Amusements — Penalties — Introduction of Corporal Punish- 
ment — The Tonsure — Attendance at Chapel — Vacations — 
Hospitality — The Career of an English Student — Meaning of 
" Poor and Indigent Scholars " — The College System at Paris 
— Sconcing — Other French Universities — A Visitation of a 
Medieval College 49 



viii LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 



Chapter V — University Discipline 

Growth of Disciplinary Regulations at Paris and/ Oxford-)- Records 
of the Chancellor's Court — Discipline in Unendowed Halls — 
Academic Dress restricted to Graduates — Louvain — Leipsic — 
Leniency of Punishments — The Scottish Universities — Table 
Manners at Aberdeen— Life at Heidelberg .... 94 



Chapter VI — The " Jocund Advent" 

Admission of the Bajan at Paris — The Universities of Southern 
France — The Abbas Bejanorum — The "Jocund Advent" in 
Germany — the " Depositio "-^Oxfords-Scotland . . . 109 



Chapter VII — Town and Gown 



/ 



Vienna-^St Scholastica's Day at Oxfords-Assaults by Members of 
the University — Records of the ' ' Acta Rectorum " at Leipsic 
— Parisian Scholars and the Monks of St Germain . . . 124 



Chapter VIII — Subjects of Study, Lectures, Examinations 

Instruction given in Latin — Preparation for the University — 
Grammar Masters — French taught at Oxford — The "Act" in 
Grammar — The Seven Liberal Arts and the Three Philosophies 
— Text-books — Ordiaary and Cursory Lectures — Methods of 
Lecturing — Repetitions and Disputations — University and 
College Teaching — Examinations at Paris, Louvain, and 
Oxford — The Determining Feast — Walter Paston at Oxford . 133 

Appendix 157 

Bibliography 159 

Index 161 



1 



LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL 
UNIVERSITY 



CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY 

A Clerk ther was of Oxenford also, 

That unto logik hadde longe y-go 

As lene was his hors as is a rake, 

And he was not right fat, I undertake ; 

But loked holwe, and therto soberly. 

Ful thredbar was his overest courtepy, 

For he had geten him yet no benef yce, 

Ne was so worldly for to have offyce. 

For him was lever have at his beddes heed 

Twenty bokes, clad in blak or reed, 

Of Aristotle and his philosophye, 

Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrye. 

But al be that he was a philosophre, 

Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre ; 

But al that he might of his freendes hente, 

On bokes and on lerninge he it spente, 

And bisily gan for the soules preye 

Of hem that yaf him wherwith to scoleye, 

Of studie took he most cure and most hede, 

Noght o word spak he more than was nede, 

And that was seyd in forme and reverence 

And short and quik, and ful of hy sentence. 

Souninge in moral vertu was his speche. 

And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche. 



2 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

An account of life in the medieval .University 
might well take the form of a commentary upon the 
classical description of a medieval English student. 
His dress, the character of his studies and the nature 
of his materials, the hardships and the natural 
ambitions of his scholar's life, his obligations to 
founders and benefactors, suggest learned expositions 
which might 

in judicious hands 
Extend from here to Mesopotamy, 

and will serve for a modest attempt to picture the 
environment of one of the Canterbury pilgrims. 

Chaucer's famous lines do more than afford oppor- 
tunities of explanation and comment ; they give 
us an indication of the place assigned to universities 
and their students by English public opinion in the 
later Middle Ages. The monk of the " Prologue " 
is simply a country gentleman. No accusation of 
immorality is brought against him, but he is a 
jovial huntsman who likes the sound of the bridle 
jingling in the wind better than the call of the 
church bells, a lover of dogs and horses, of rich 
clothes and great feasts. The portrait of the friar 
is still less sympathetic ; he is a frequenter of 
taverns, a devourer of widows' houses, a man of 
gross, perhaps of evil, life. The monk abandons 
his cloister and its rules, the friar despises the poor 



INTRODUCTORY 3 

and the leper. The poet is making no socialistic 
attack upon the foundations of society, and no 
heretical onslaught upon the Church ; he draws a 
portrait of two types of the English regular clergy. 
His description of two types of the English secular 
clergy forms an illuminating contrast. The noble 
verses, in which he tells of the virtues of the parish 
priest, certainly imply that the seculars also had their 
temptations and that they did not always resist 
them ; but the fact remains that Chaucer chose as 
the representative of the parochial clergy one who 

" way ted after no pompe and reverence, 
Ne maked him a spyced conscience, 
But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve, 
He taughte, but first he folwed it himselve." 

The history of pious and charitable foundations is 
a vindication of the truth of the portraiture of the 
" Prologue." The foundation of a new monastery 
and the endowment of the friars had alike ceased 
to attract the benevolent donor, who was turning 
his attention to the universities, where secular 
clergy were numerous. The clerks of Oxford and 
Cambridge had succeeded to the place held by the 
monks, and, after them, by the friars, in the affection 
and the respect of the nation. 

Outside the kingdom of England the fourteenth 
century was also a great period in the growth of 



4 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

universities and colleges, to which, all over Europe, 
privileges and endowments were granted by popes, 
emperors, kings, princes, bishops and municipalities. 
To attempt to indicate the various causes and con- 
ditions which, in different countries, led to the 
growth, in numbers and in wealth, of institutions 
for the pursuit of learning would be to wander from 
our special topic ; but we may take the period from 
the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the 
fifteenth century as that in which the medieval 
University made its greatest appeal to the imagina- 
tion of the peoples of Europe. Its institutional forms 
had become definite, its terminology fixed, and the 
materials for a study of the life of the fourteenth 
century student are abundant. The conditions of 
student life varied, of course, with country and 
climate, and with the differences in the constitutions 
of individual universities and in their relations to 
Church and State. No single picture of the medieval 
student can be drawn, but it will be convenient to 
choose the second half of the fourteenth century, 
or the first half of the fifteenth, as the central point 
of our investigation. 

We have already used technical terms, " Univer- 
sity," " College," " Student/' which require elucida- 
tion, and others will arise in the course of our inquiry. 
What is a University ? At the present day a 
University is, in England, a corporation whose 



INTRODUCTORY 5 

power of granting certain degrees is recognised by 
the State ; but nothing of this is implied in the word 
" University." Its literal meaning is simply an 
association. Recent writers on University history 
have pointed out that Universitas vestra, in a letter 
addressed to a body of persons, means merely " the 
whole of you " and that the term was by no means 
restricted to learned bodies. It was frequently 
applied to municipal corporations ; Dr Rashdall, in 
his learned work, tells us that it is used by medieval 
writers in addressing " all faithful Christian people," 
and he quotes an instance in which Pisan captives 
at Genoa in the end of the thirteenth century 
formed themselves into a " Universitas carcera- 
torum." The word " College " affords us no 
further enlightenment. It, too, means literally a 
community or association, and, unlike the sister 
term University, it has never become restricted to a 
scholastic association. The Senators of the " College 
of Justice " are the judges of the Supreme Court 
in Scotland. 

We must call in a third term to help us. In what 
we should describe as the early days of European 
universities, there came into use a phrase some- 
times written as Stvdium Universale or Studium 
Commune, but more usually Studium Generate. 
It was used in much the same sense in which we 
speak of a University to-day, and a short sketch 



6 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

of its history is necessary for the solution of our 
problem. 

The twelfth century produced in Europe a renewal 
of interest and a revival of learning, brought about 
partly by the influence of great thinkers like St 
Anselm and Abelard, and partly by the discovery 
of lost works of Aristotle. The impulse thus given 
to study resulted in an increase in the numbers of 
students, and students were naturally attracted to 
schools where masters and teachers possessed, or 
had left behind them, great names N At Bologna 
there was a great teacher of the Civil Law in the 
first quarter of the twelfth century, and a great 
writer on Canon Law lived there in the middle of the 
same century. To Bologna, therefore, there flocked 
students of law, though not of law alone. In the 
schools of Paris there were great masters of philo- 
sophy and theology to whom students crowded from 
all parts of Europe. Many of the foreign students 
at Paris were Englishmen, and when, at the time 
of Becket's quarrel with Henry II. , the disputes 
between the sovereigns of England and France led 
to the recall of English students from the domain 
of their King's enemy, there grew up at Oxford a 
great school or Studium, which acquired some- 
thing of the fame of Paris and Bologna. A struggle 
between the clerks who studied at Oxford and the 
people of the town broke out at the time of John's 



INTRODUCTORY 7 

defiance of the Papacy, when the King outlawed the 
clergy of England, and this struggle led to the rise 
of a school at Cambridge. In Italy the institutions 
of the Studium at Bologna were copied at Modena, 
at Reggio, at Vicenza, at Arezzo, at Padua, and 
elsewhere, and in 1244 or 1245 Pope Innocent IV. 
founded a Studium of a different constitution, in 
dependence upon the Papal Court. In Spain great 
schools grew up at Palencia, Salamanca, and Valla- 
dolid ; in France at Montpellier, Orleans, Angers, 
and Toulouse, and at Lyons and Reims. The 
impulse given by Bologna and Paris was thus leading 
to the foundation of new Studia or the development 
of old ones, for there were schools of repute at many 
of the places we have mentioned before the period 
with which we are now dealing (c. 1170-1250). It 
was inevitable that there should be a rivalry among 
these numerous schools, a rivalry which was ac- 
centuated as small and insignificant Studia came 
to claim for themselves equality of status with their 
older and greater contemporaries. Thus, in the 
latter half of the thirteenth century, there arose a 
necessity for a definition and a restriction of the 
term Studium Generale. The desirabilhty of a 
definition was enhanced by the practice of granting 
to ecclesiastics dispensations from residence in their 
benefices for purposes of study ; to prevent abuses 
it was essential that such permission should 



8 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

be limited to a number of recognised Studia 
Generalia. 

The difficulty of enforcing such a definition 
throughout almost the whole of Europe might seem 
likely to be great, but in point of fact it was in- 
considerable. In the first half of the thirteenth 
century, the term Studium Generale was assuming 
a recognised significance ; a school which aspired 
to the name must not be restricted to natives of a 
particular town or country, it must have a number 
of masters, and it must teach not only the Seven 
Liberal Arts (of which we shall have to speak later), 
but also one or more of the higher studies of 
Theology, Law and Medicine (cf. Rashdall, vol. i. 
p. 9). But the title might still be adopted at will by 
ambitious schools, and the intervention of the great 
potentates of Europe was required to provide a 
mechanism for the differentiation of General from 
Particular Studia. Already, in the twelfth century, 
an Emperor and a Pope had given special privileges 
to students at Bologna and other Lombard towns, 
and a King of France had conferred privileges 
upon the scholars of Paris. In 1224 the Studium 
Generale of Naples was founded by the Emperor 
Frederick II., and in 1231 he gave a great 
privilege to the School of Medicine at Salerno, a 
Studium which was much more ancient than Bologna, 
but which existed solely for the study of Medicine 



INTRODUCTORY 9 

and exerted no influence upon the growth of the 
European universities. Pope Gregory IX. founded 
the Studium at Toulouse some fifteen years before 
Innocent IV. established the Studium of the Roman 
Court. In 1254 Alfonso the Wise of Castile founded 
the Studium Generale of Salamanca. Thus it 
became usual for a school which claimed the status 
of a Studium Generale to possess the authority of 
Pope or Emperor or King. 

A distinction gradually arose between a Studium 
Generale under the authority of a Pope or an Em- 
peror and one which was founded by a King or a 
City Republic, and which was known as a Studium 
Generale respectu regni. The distinction was founded 
upon the power of the Emperor or the Pope to grant 
the jus ubique docendi. This privilege, which could 
be conferred by no lesser potentate, gave a master 
in one Studium Generale the right of teaching in 
any other ; it was more valuable in theory than in 
practice, but it was held in such esteem that in 1292 
Bologna and Paris accepted the privilege from Pope 
Nicholas IV. Some of the Studia which we have 
mentioned as existing in the first half of the thirteenth 
century — Modena in Italy, and Lyons and Reims 
in France — never obtained this privilege, and as 
their organisation and their importance did not 
justify their inclusion among Studia Generalia, 
they never took rank among the universities of 



10 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

Europe. The status of Bologna and of Paris was, 
of course, universally recognised before and apart 
from the Bulls of Nicholas IV. ; Padua did not 
accept a Papal grant until 1346 and then merely 
as a confirmation, not a creation, of its privileges as 
a Studium Generale ; Oxford never received, though 
it twice asked for, a declaratory or confirmatory 
Bull, and based its claim upon immemorial custom 
and its own great position. Cambridge, which in 
the thirteenth century was a much less important 
seat of learning than Oxford, was formally recognised 
as a Studium Generale by Pope John XXII. in 1318 ; 
but its claim to the title had long been admitted, 
at all events within the realm of England. After 
1318 Cambridge could grant the licentia ubique 
docendi, which Oxford did not formally confer, 
although Oxford men, as the graduates of a Studium 
Generale, certainly possessed the privilege. 

Long before the definition of a Studium Generale 
as a school possessing, by the gift of Pope or 
Emperor, the jus ubique docendi, was generally ac- 
cepted throughout Europe, we find the occurrence 
of the more familiar term, " Universitas," which 
we are now in a position to understand. 

A Universitas was an association in the world of 
learning which corresponded to a Guild in the 
world of commerce, a union among men living in a 
Studium and possessing some common interests to 



INTRODUCTORY 11 

protect and advance. Originally, a Universitas 
could exist in a less important school than a Studium 
Generale, but with exceptional instances of this 
kind we are not concerned. By the time which we 
have chosen for the central point of our survey, the 
importance of these guilds or Universitates had so 
greatly increased that the word " Universitas " 
was coming to be equivalent to " Studium Generale/"' 
In the fifteenth century, Dr Rashdall tells us, the 
two terms were synonymous. The Universitas 
Studii, the guild of the School, became, technically 
and officially, the Studium Generale itself, and 
Studia Generalia were distinguished by the kind 
of Universitates or guilds which they possessed. It 
is usual to speak of Bologna and Paris as the two 
great archetypal universities, and this description 
does not depend upon mere priority of date or upon 
the impetus given to thought and interest in Europe 
by their teachers or their methods. Bologna and 
Paris were two Studia Generalia with two different 
and irreconcilable types of Universitas. The 
Universitates of the Studium of Bologna were guilds 
of students ; the Universitas of the Studium of 
Paris was a guild of masters. The great seats of 
learning in Medieval Europe were either universities 
of students or universities of masters, imitations of 
Bologna or of Paris, or modifications of one or the 
other or of both. It would be impossible to draw 



12 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

up a list and divide medieval universities into 
compartments. Nothing is more difficult to classify 
than the constitutions of living societies ; a con- 
stitution which one man might regard as a modifica- 
tion of the constitution of Bologna would be in the 
opinion of another more correctly described as a 
modification of the constitution of Paris, and a 
development in the constitution of a University 
might be held to have altered its fundamental 
position and to transfer it from one class to another. 
Where students legislated for themselves, their 
rules were neither numerous nor detailed. Our 
information about life in the student-universities is, 
therefore, comparatively small, and it is with the 
universities of masters that we shall be chiefly 
concerned. It is, however, essential to understand 
the powers acquired by the student-guilds at Bologna, 
the institutions of which were reproduced by most 
of the Italian universities, by those of Spain and 
Portugal, and,. much less accurately, by the smaller 
universities of France. 



CHAPTER II 

LIFE IN THE STUDENT- UNIVERSITIES 

The Universitates or guilds which were formed in 
the Studium Generale of Bologna were associations 
of foreign students. The lack of political unity in 
the Italian peninsula was one of the circumstances 
that led to the peculiar and characteristic constitu- 
tion evolved by the Italian universities. A famous 
Studium in an Italian city state must of necessity 
attract a large proportion of foreign students. These 
foreign students had neither civil nor political 
rights ; they were men " out of their own law," 
for whom the government under which they lived 
made small and uncertain provision. Their strength 
lay in their numbers, and in the effect which their 
presence produced upon the prosperity and the 
reputation of the town. They early recognised the 
necessity of union if full use was to be made of 
the offensive and defensive weapons they pos- 
sessed. The men who came to study law at Bologna 
were not schoolboys ; some of them were beneficed 
ecclesiastics, others were lawyers, and most of them 
were possessed of adequate means of living. The 
provisions of Roman Law favoured the creation 

13 



14 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

of such protective guilds ; the privileges and im- 
munities of the clergy afforded an analogy for the 
claim of foreign students to possess laws of their 
own ; and the threat of the secession of a large 
community was likely to render a city state amen- 
able to argument. The growth of guilds or com- 
munities held together by common interests and 
safeguarded by solemn oaths is one of the features 
of European history of the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries, and the students of Bologna took no 
unusual or extraordinary step when they formed 
their Universitates. 

The distinction of students into " Nations," 
which is still preserved in some of the Scottish 
universities, is derived from this guild-forming 
movement at Bologna at the end of the twelfth and 
the beginning of the thirteenth century. No citizen 
of Bologna was permitted to be a member of a guild, 
the protection of which he did not require. The 
tendency at first was towards the formation of a 
number of Universitates, membership of which was 
decided by considerations of nationality. But the 
conditions which had led to the formation of these 
Universitates were also likely to produce some 
measure of unification, and the law-students at 
Bologna soon ceased to have more than two great 
guilds, distinguished on geographical principles as 
the Universitas Citramontanorum and the Univer- 



LIFE IN THE STUDENT-UNIVERSITIES 15 

sitas Ultramontanorum. Each was sub- divided into 
nations ; the cis- Alpine University consisting of 
Lombards, Tuscans, and Romans, and the trans- 
Alpine University of a varying number, including a 
Spanish, a Gascon, a Provencal, a Norman, and an 
English nation. The three cis- Alpine nations were, 
of course, much more populous at Bologna than the 
dozen or more trans- Alpine nations, and they were 
therefore sub-divided into sections known as Con- 
siliariae. The students of Arts and Medicine, who 
at first possessed no organisation of their own and 
were under the control of the great law-guilds, 
succeeded in the fourteenth century in establishing 
a new Universitas within the Studium. The in- 
fluence of Medicine predominated, for the Arts 
course was, at Bologna, regarded as merely a pre- 
paration for the study of Law and, especially, of 
Medicine ; but this third Universitas gave a definite 
status and definite rights to the students of Arts. 
In the same century the two jurist universities 
came to act together so constantly that they were, 
for practical purposes, united, so that, by the begin- 
ning of the fifteenth century, the Studium Generale 
of Bologna contained virtually two universities, 
one of Law, and the other of Arts and Medicine, 
governed by freely-elected rectors. The peculiar 
relations of Theology to the Studium and to 
the universities is a topic which belongs to 



16 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

constitutional history, and not to our special 
subject. 

The universities of Bologna had to maintain a 
struggle with two other organisations, the guilds 
of masters and the authorities of the city state. 
They kept the first in subjection ; they ultimately 
succumbed to the second. A guild of masters, 
doctors, or professors had existed in the Studium 
before the rise of the Universitates, and it survived 
with limited, but clearly defined, powers. The 
words " Doctor/' " Professor," and " Magister " 
or " Dominus " were at first used indifferently, and 
a Master of Arts of a Scottish or a German University 
is still described on his diploma as a Doctor of 
Philosophy. The term " Master " was little used 
at Bologna, but it is convenient to employ " master " 
and " student " as the general terms for teacher and 
taught. The masters were the teachers of the 
Studium, and they protected their own interests 
by forming a guild the members of which, and they 
alone, had the right to teach. Graduation was 
originally admission into the guild of masters, and 
the chief privilege attached to it was the right to 
teach. This privilege ultimately became merely 
a theoretical right at Bologna, where the teachers 
tended to become a close corporation of professors, 
like the Senatus of a Scottish University. 

The Guild or College of Masters who taught law 



LIFE IN THE STUDENT-UNIVERSITIES 17 

in the Studium of Bologna naturally resented the 
rise of the universities of students. The doctors, 
they said, should elect the rectors, as they do at 
Paris. The scholars follow no trade, they are merely 
the pupils of those who do practise a profession, and 
they have no right to choose rulers for themselves 
any more than the apprentices of the skinners. The 
masters were citizens of Bologna, and it might be 
expected that the State would assist them in their 
struggle with a body of foreign apprentices ; but the 
threat of migration turned the scales in favour of the 
students. There were no buildings and no endow- 
ments to render a migration difficult, and migration 
did from time to time take place. The masters 
themselves were dependent upon fees for their liveli- 
hood ; they were, at Bologna, frequently laymen 
with no benefice to fall back upon, and with wives 
and children to maintain. As time went on and the 
teaching masters became a limited number of pro- 
fessors, they were given salaries, at first by the 
student- universities themselves and afterwards by 
the city, which feared to offend the student-univer- 
sities. They thus passed, to a large extent, under the 
control of the universities ; how far, we shall see 
as our story progresses. The city authorities tried 
ineffectually to curb the universities and to prevent 
migrations, but the students, with the support of 
the Papacy, succeeded in maintaining the strength 



18 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

of their organisations, and when, in the middle of 
the fourteenth century, secessions from Bologna 
came to an end, the students had obtained the 
recognition and most of the privileges they desired. 
In course of time the authority of the State increased 
at Bologna and elsewhere, bodies of Reformatores 
Studii came to be appointed by republics or tyrants 
in Italian university-cities, and these boards gradu- 
ally absorbed the government of the universities. 
The foundation of residential colleges, and the 
erection of buildings by the universities themselves, 
deprived the students of the possibility of reviving 
the long disused weapon of a migration, and when 
the power of the Papacy became supreme in Bologna, 
the freedom of its student- universities came to an 
end. This, however, belongs to a later age. We 
must now attempt to obtain some picture of the 
life of a medieval student at Bologna during the 
greatness of the Universitates. 

We will choose an Englishman who arrives at 
Bologna early in the fifteenth century to study law. 
He finds himself at once a member of the English 
nation of the Trans-montane University ; he pays 
his fee, takes the oath of obedience to the Rector, 
and his name is placed upon the " matricula " or 
roll of members of the University. He does not 
look about for a lodging-house, like a modern student 
in a Scottish University, but joins with some com- 



LIFE IN THE STUDENT-UNIVERSITIES 19 

panions (socii) probably of his own nation, to take 
a house. If our newcomer had been a Spaniard, 
he might have been fortunate enough to find a place 
in the great Spanish College which had been founded 
in the latter half of the fourteenth century ; as it is, 
he and his friends settle down almost as citizens of 
Bologna. The success of the universities in their 
attempt to form a citizenship outside the state had 
long ago resulted in the creation also of a semi- 
citizenship within the state. The laws of the city 
of Bologna allowed the students to be regarded as 
citizens so long as they were members of a Univer- 
sity. Our young Englishman has, of course, no 
share in the government of the town, but he possesses 
all rights necessary for the protection of his person 
and property ; he can make a legal will and bring 
an action against a citizen. The existence of these 
privileges, unusual and remarkable in a medieval 
state, may excite his curiosity about the method by 
which they were acquired, and he will probably be 
told strange and terrible tales of the bad old times, 
when a foreign student was as helpless as any other 
foreigner in a strange town, and might be tortured 
by unfair and tyrannous judges. If he is historically 
minded, he will learn about the rise of the smaller 
guilds which are now amalgamated in his Univer- 
sitas ; how, like other guilds, they were benefit 
societies caring for the sick and the poor, burying 



20 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

the dead, and providing for common religious 
services and common feasts. He will be told (in 
language unfamiliar at Oxford) how the proctors or 
representatives of the guild were sent to cheer up 
the sick and, if necessary, to relieve their necessities, 
and to reconcile members who had quarrelled. The 
corporate payment for feasts included the cost of 
replacing broken windows, which (at all events 
among the German students at Bologna) seem to 
have been associated with occasions of rejoicing. 
The guild would pay for the release of one of its 
members who was in prison, but it would also insist 
upon the payment of the debts, even of those who 
had " gone down." It was essential that the 
credit of the guild with the citizens of Bologna 
should be maintained. 

Many of these purposes were still served by the 
" nation " to which our Bologna freshman be- 
longed : but the really important organisation was 
that of his Universitas. One of his first duties might 
happen to be connected with the election of a new 
Rector. The title of the office was common in Italy 
and was the equivalent of the Podesta, or chief 
magistrate, of an Italian town. The choice of a new 
Rector would probably be limited, for the honour 
was costly, and the share of the fines which the 
Rector received could not nearly meet his expenses. 
As his jurisdiction included clerks, it was necessary, 



LIFE IN THE STUDENT-UNIVERSITIES 21 

by the Canon Law, that he should have the tonsure, 
and be, at all events technically, a clerk. He could 
not belong to any religious order, his obligations to 
which might conflict with his duty to the Univer- 
sitas, and the expense of the office made it desirable 
that he should be a beneficed clergyman who was 
dispensed from residence in his benefice ; he could 
enter upon his duties at the age of twenty-four, 
and he was not necessarily a priest or even a deacon. 
Our freshman played a small part in the election. 
As a member of the English nation, he would help 
to choose a Consiliarius, who had a vote in the 
election, and who became one of the Rector's 
permanent Council. The dignity of the Rector's 
position would be impressed upon our novice by 
his senior contemporaries, who could boast that, 
if a Cardinal came to Bologna, he must yield pre- 
cedence to the Rector, and the lesson would be 
emphasised by a great feast on the occasion of the 
solemn installation and possibly by a tournament 
and a dance, certainly by some more magnificent 
banquet than that given by a Rector of the Univer- 
sity of Arts and Medicine. After our student's 
day there grew up a strange ceremony of tearing 
the robe of the new Rector and selling back the 
pieces to him, and statutes had to be passed prohibit- 
ing the acceptance of money for the fragments, 
although if any student succeeded in capturing the 



22 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

robe without injuring it, he might claim its redemp- 
tion. The state and hospitality which the office 
entailed led to its being made compulsory to accept 
the offer of it, but this arrangement failed to main- 
tain the ancient prestige of the Rectorship which, 
after the decline of the Universitates themselves, 
had outlived its usefulness. 

Magnificent as was the position of the Rector of 
a Universitas, our young Englishman would soon 
discover that his Rector was only a constitutional 
sovereign. He had to observe the statutes and to 
consult his Council upon important questions. He 
had no power to dispense with the penalties imposed 
by the regulations, and for any mismanagement 
of the pecuniary affairs of the Universitas he was 
personally liable, when at the end of his period of 
office he had to meet a Committee and to render 
an account of his stewardship. He could sentence 
offending students to money fines, but he must have 
the consent of his Council before expelling them or 
declaring them subject to the ecclesiastical and 
social penalties of the perjured man. He claimed 
to try cases brought by students against townsmen, 
and about the time of our scholar's arrival, the town 
had admitted that he might try students accused 
of criminal offences forbidden by the University 
statutes, and had agreed to carry out his sentences. 
Too free a use of the secular arm would naturally 



LIFE IN THE STUDENT-UNIVERSITIES 23 

lead to unpopularity and trouble ; the spectacle of 
a student being handed over to the gaolers of the 
Podesta or of the Bishop can never have been 
pleasant in the eyes of a Universitas. Changes in 
the statutes of the University could not be made by 
the Rector ; every twenty years eight " Statutarii " 
were appointed to revise the code, and alterations 
made at other times required the consent of the 
Congregation, which consisted of all students except 
citizens of Bologna and a few poor scholars who did 
not subscribe to the funds of the Universitas. By 
the time of which we are speaking, the two jurist- 
universities at Bologna met together in one Con- 
gregation, and if a Congregation happens to be held 
during our Englishman's residence at Bologna, 
he will find himself bound under serious penalties 
to attend its session, where he will mix on equal 
terms with members of the Cismontane University, 
listening to, or taking part in, the debates (conducted 
in Latin) and throwing his black or white bean into 
the ballot box when a vote is necessary. 

Although the city of Bologna never admitted the 
jurisdiction of a Universitas over citizens of the 
town, there were some classes of citizens whose trade 
or profession made them virtually its subjects. 
Landlords, stationers, and masters or doctors were 
in a peculiar relation to the universities, which did 
not fail to use their advantage to the uttermost. 



24 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

If our English student and his socii had any dispute 
about the rent of their house, there was a com- 
pulsory system of arbitration ; if he found an error 
in a MS. which he had hired or purchased from a 
Bologna bookseller he was bound to report it to a 
University Board whose duty it was to inspect MSS. 
offered for sale or hire, and the bookseller would be 
ordered to pay a fine ; he was protected from ex- 
tortionate prices by a system which allowed the 
bookseller a fixed profit on a second-hand book. 
MSS. were freely reproduced by the booksellers' 
clerks, and were neither scarce nor unduly expensive, 
although elaborately illuminated MSS. were natur- 
ally very valuable. The landlords and the book- 
sellers were kept in proper submission by threats 
of inter dictio or privatio. A citizen who offended the 
University was debarred from all intercourse with 
students, who were strictly forbidden to hire his 
house or his books ; if a townsman brought a 
" calumnious accusation " against a student, and 
disobeyed a rectorial command to desist, he and his 
children, to the third generation, and all their goods, 
were to lie under an interdict, " sine spe restitutionis." 
Interdictio, or discommuning, was also the great 
weapon which might be employed^against the masters 
of the Studium. The degradation of the masters was 
a gradual process, and it was never complete. The 
privileges given by Frederick Barbarossa to Lombard 



LIFE IN THE STUDENT-UNIVERSITIES 25 

scholars in the middle of the twelfth century included 
a right of jurisdiction over their pupils, and a Papal 
Bull of the end of the century speaks of masters 
and scholars meeting together in congregations. 
The organisation of the Universitas ultimately 
confined membership of congregation to students, 
and the powers of the Rector rendered the magisterial 
jurisdiction merely nominal. The loss of their 
privileges is attributed by Canon Rashdall to the 
attitude they adopted in the early struggles between 
the municipality and the student-guilds. The 
doctors, who were citizens of Bologna, allied them- 
selves, he says, " with the City against the students 
in the selfish effort to exclude from the substantial 
privileges of the Doctorate all but their own fellow- 
citizens. ... It was through identifying themselves 
with the City rather than with the scholars that the 
Doctors of Bologna sank into their strange and un- 
dignified servitude to their own pupils/' The}^ 
made a further mistake in quarrelling with the town 
— the earliest migrations were migrations of pro- 
fessors — and when, in the middle of the thirteenth 
century, a permanent modus vivendi was arrived at 
between the city and the universities, the rights 
of the doctors received no consideration. Other 
citizens of Bologna were forbidden to take an oath 
of obedience to the rectors, but the masters, who, 
in theory, possessed rights of jurisdiction over their 



26 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

pupils, were, in fact, compelled by the universities 
to take this oath. Even those of them who received 
salaries from the town were not exempted. A 
doctor who refused to take a vow of obedience 
to the representative of his pupils had no means 
of collecting his lecture-fees, which remained of some 
importance even after the introduction of salaries, 
and he was liable to further punishment at the 
will of the Rector. The ultimate penalty was 
deprivatio, and when this sentence was pronounced, 
not only were the lectures of the offending doctor 
boycotted, but all social intercourse with him was 
forbidden ; students must avoid his company in 
private as well as decline his ministrations in the 
Studium. His restoration could only be accom- 
plished by a vote of the whole University solemnly 
assembled in Congregation. 

The oath of obedience was not merely a con- 
stitutional weapon kept in reserve for occasional 
serious disputes ; it affected the daily life of the 
Studium, and the masters were subject to numerous 
petty indignities, which could not fail to impress 
our English student if he was familiar with Univer- 
sity life in his own country. He would see, with 
surprise, a doctor's lecture interrupted by the arrival 
of a University Bedel, as the debates of the House 
of Commons are interrupted by the arrival of Black 
Rod, and his instructor would maintain a reverent 



LIFE IN THE STUDENT-UNIVERSITIES 27 

silence while the Rector's officer delivered some 
message from the University, or informed the pro- 
fessor of some new regulation. If the learned 
doctor " cut " a lecture, our student would find 
himself compelled to inform the authorities of the 
University, and he would hear of fines inflicted upon 
the doctors for absence, for lateness, for attracting 
too small an audience, for omitting portions of 
a subject or avoiding the elucidation of its difficul- 
ties, and for inattention while the " precepta " or 
" mandata " of the Rector were being read in the 
schools. He and his fellow-students might graci- 
ously grant their master a holiday, but the permis- 
sion had to be confirmed by the Rector ; if a lecture 
was prolonged a minute after the appointed time, 
the doctor found himself addressing empty benches. 
The humiliation of the master's position was in- 
creased by the fact that his pupils were always 
acting as spies upon him, and they were themselves 
liable to penalties for conniving at any infringe- 
ment of the regulations on his part. At Bologna, 
even the privilege of teaching was, to a slight extent, 
shared by the doctors with their pupils. Lectures 
were divided into two classes, ordinary and extra- 
ordinary ; the ordinary lectures were the duty of 
the doctors, but senior students (bachelors) were 
authorised by the Rector to share with the doctors 
the duty of giving extra- ordinary lectures. There 



28 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

were six chairs, endowed by the city, which were 
held by students, and the occupant of one of these 
was entitled to deliver ordinary lectures. Dr 
Rashdall finds the explanation of this anomaly in 
an incident in the fourteenth century history of 
Bologna, when the Tyrant of the City forbade the 
professors to teach. The student-chairs were rather 
endowments for the Rectorship or for poor scholars 
than serious rivals to the ordinary professorships, 
and the extra-ordinary lectures delivered by students 
or bachelors may be regarded as a kind of apprentice- 
ship for future doctors. 

There remained one department of the work of 
the Studium in which our Bologna student would 
find his masters supreme. The sacred right of 
examining still belonged to the teachers, even 
though the essential purpose of the examination was 
changed. The doctors of Bologna had succeeded 
in preserving the right to teach as a privilege of 
Bolognese citizens and even of restricting it, to some 
extent, to certain families, and the foreign student 
could not hope to become a professor of his own 
studium. But the prestige of the University 
rendered Bolognese students ambitious of the 
doctorate, and the doctorate had come to mean 
more than a mere licence to teach. This licence, 
which had originally been conferred by the doctors 
themselves, required, after the issue of a Papal 



LIFE IN THE STUDENT- UNIVERSITIES 29 

Bull in 1219, the consent of the Archdeacon of 
Bologna, and the Papal grant of the jus ubique 
docendi in 1292 increased at once the importance 
of the mastership and of the authority of the Arch- 
deacon, who came to be described as the Chancellor 
and Head of the Studium. " Graduation/' in Dr 
Rashdall's words, " ceased to imply the mere ad- 
mission into a private Society of teachers, and 
bestowed a definite legal status in the eyes of Church 
and State alike. . . . The Universities passed from 
merely local into ecumenical organisations ; the 
Doctorate became an order of intellectual nobility 
with as distinct and definite a place in the hier- 
archical system of medieval Christendom as the 
Priesthood or the Knighthood." The Archdeacon 
of Bologna, even when he was regarded as the 
Chancellor, did not wrest from the college of doctors 
the right to decide who should be deemed worthy of 
a title which Cardinals were pleased to possess. 
The licence which he required before admitting a 
student to the doctorate continued to be conferred 
by the Bologna doctors after due examination. 

We will assume that our English student has now 
completed his course of study. He has duly at- 
tended the prescribed lectures — not less than three 
a week. He has gone in the early mornings, when 
the bell at St Peter's Church was ringing for mass, 
to spend some two hours listening to the " ordinary " 



30 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

lecture delivered by a doctor in his own house 
or in a hired room ; his successors a generation or 
two later would find buildings erected by the Univer- 
sity for the purpose. The rest of his morning and 
an hour or two in the afternoon have also, if he is an 
industrious student, been devoted to lectures, and 
he has not been neglectful of private study. He has 
enjoyed the numerous holidays afforded by the 
Feasts of the Church, and several vacations in the 
course of the year, including ten days at Christmas, 
a fortnight at Easter, and about six weeks in the 
autumn. After five years of study, if he is a civilian, 
and four if he is a canonist, the Rector has raised 
him to the dignity of a Bachelor by permitting him 
to give " extra-ordinary " lectures — and after two 
more years spent in this capacity he is ready to 
proceed to the doctorate. The Rector, having been 
satisfied by the English representative in his Council 
that the " doctorand " has performed the whole 
duty of the Bolognese student, gives him permission 
to enter for the first or Private Examination, and 
he again takes the oath of obedience to that dignitary. 
The doctor under whom he has studied vouches for 
his competence, and presents him first to the Arch- 
deacon and some days afterwards to the College of 
Doctors, before whom he takes a solemn oath never 
to seek admittance into the Bolognese College of 
Doctors, or to teach, or attempt to perform any of 



LIFE IN THE STUDENT-UNIVERSITIES 31 

the functions of a doctor, at Bologna. They then 
give him a passage for exposition and send him 
home. He is followed to his house by his own doctor 
who hears his exposition in private, and brings 
him back to the august presence of the College 
of Doctors and the Archdeacon. Here he treats 
his thesis and is examined upon it by two or 
more doctors, who are ordered by the University 
statutes not to treat any victim of this rigorous 
and tremendous examination otherwise than if he 
were their own son, and are threatened with grave 
penalties, including suspension for a year. The 
College then votes upon his case, each doctor saying 
openly and clearly, and without any qualification, 
" Approbo " or " Reprobo," and if the decision is 
favourable he is now a Licentiate and has to face 
only the expensive but not otherwise formidable 
ordeal of the second or Public Examination. As a 
newly appointed Scottish judge is, to this day, 
admitted to his office by trying cases, so the Bologna 
doctor was admitted to his new dignity by an 
exercise in lecturing. The idea is common to many 
medieval institutions, and it survived at Bologna, 
even though the licentiate had, at his private 
examination, renounced the right of teaching. 
Our Englishman and his socii go together to the 
Cathedral, where he states a thesis and defends it 
against the attacks of other licentiates. His own 



32 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

doctor, known in Bologna (and elsewhere) as the 
Promotor, presents him to the Chancellor, who 
confers upon him the jus ubique docendi. He is 
then seated in a master's chair, and the Promotor 
gives him an open book and a gold ring and (in 
the terminology of a modern Scottish University) 
" caps " him with the biretta. He is dismissed with 
a benediction and the kiss of peace, and is con- 
ducted through the town, in triumphal procession, 
by his friends, to whom he gives a feast. 

The feast adds very considerably to the expenses 
of the doctorate, for which fees are, of course, ex- 
acted by the authorities of the University, the 
College of Doctors, and the Archdeacon. A con- 
siderable proportion of the disciplinary regulations, 
made by the student-universities, aimed at restrict- 
ing the expenditure on feasting at the inception 
of a new doctor and on other occasions. When our 
young English Doctorand received the permission 
of his Rector to proceed to his degree, he was made 
to promise not to exceed the proper expenditure on 
fees and feasts, and he was expressly forbidden to 
organise a tournament. The spending of money 
on extravagant costume was also prohibited by 
the statutes of the University, which forbade a 
student to purchase, either directly or through an 
agent, any costume other than the ordinary black 
garment, or any outer covering other than the 



LIFE IN THE STUDENT-UNIVERSITIES 33 

black cappa or gabard. Other disciplinary restric- 
tions at Bologna dealt with quarrelling and gambling. 
The debates of Congregation were not to be liable 
to interruption by one student stabbing his opponent 
in Italian fashion, and no one was allowed to carry 
arms to a meeting of Congregation ; if a student 
had reason to apprehend personal violence from 
another, the Rector could give him a dispensation 
from the necessity of attendance. Gaming and 
borrowing from unauthorised money-lenders were 
strictly forbidden ; to enter a gaming-house, or to 
keep one, or to watch a game of dice was strictly 
forbidden. The University of Arts and Medicine 
granted a dispensation for three days at Christmas, 
and a Rector might use his own discretion in the 
matter. The penalties were fines, and for contumacy 
or grave offences, suspension or expulsion. 

There are indications that the conduct of the 
doctors in these respects was not above suspicion ; 
they were expressly prohibited from keeping gaming- 
houses ; and the appointment of four merchants 
of the town, who alone were empowered to lend 
money to students, was a protection not only against 
ordinary usurers, but also against doctors who 
lent money to students in order to attract them to 
their lectures. That the ignominious position of 
the Bologna doctors had an evil effect upon their 
morals, is evident not only from this, but also from 
c 



34 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

the existence of bribery, in connection with examina- 
tions for the doctorate, although corruption of this 
kind was not confined to the student-universities. 

The regulations of the greatest of the residential 
colleges of Bologna, the College of Spain, naturally 
interfere much more with individual liberty than 
do the statutes of the student-universities, even 
though the government of the College was a 
democracy, based upon the democratic constitution 
of the University. We shall have an opportunity 
of referring to the discipline of the Spanish College 
when we deal with the College system in the northern 
universities, and meanwhile we pass to some illustra- 
tions of life in student-universities elsewhere than 
at Bologna. 

At Padua we find a " Schools-peace " like the 
special peace of the highway or the market in 
medieval England ; special penalties were pre- 
scribed for attacks on scholars in the Schools, or 
going to or returning from the Schools at the 
accustomed hours. The presence of the Rector 
also made a slight attack count as an " atrocious 
injury/' The University threatened to interdict,' 
for ten years, the ten houses nearest to the place 
where a scholar was killed ; if he was wounded the 
period was four or six years. At Florence, where 
the Faculty of Medicine was very important, there 
is an interesting provision for the study of anatomy. 



LIFE IN THE STUDENT-UNIVERSITIES 35 

An agreement was made with the town, by which 
the students of Medicine were to have two corpses 
every year, one male and one female. The bodies 
were to be those of malefactors, who gained, to some 
extent, by the arrangement, for the woman's penalty 
was to be changed from burning, and the man's 
from decapitation, to hanging. A pathetic clause 
provides that the criminals are not to be natives 
of Florence, but of captive race, with few friends 
or relations. If the number of medical students 
increased, they were to have two male bodies. At 
Florence, as almost everywhere, we find regulations 
against gambling, but an exception was made for 
the Kalends of May and the days immediately before 
and after, and no penalty could be inflicted for 
gambling in the house of the Rector. The records 
of Florence afford an illustration of the checks 
upon the rectorial power, to which we have referred 
in speaking of the typical Student-University at 
Bologna. In 1433, a series of complaints were 
brought against a certain Hieronimus who had 
just completed his year of office as Rector, and a 
Syndicate, consisting of a Doctor of Decrees (who 
was also a scholar in civil law), a scholar in Canon 
Law, and a scholar in Medicine, was appointed to 
inquire into the conduct of the late Rector and of 
his two Camerarii. The accusations were both 
general and personal, and the Syndics, after deciding 



36 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

that Hieronimus must restore eight silver grossi 

of University money which he had appropriated, 

proceeded to hear the charges brought by individuals. 

A lecturer in the University complained that the 

Rector had unjustly and maliciously given a sentence 

against him and in favour of a Greek residing at 

Florence, and that he had unjustly declared him 

perjured ; fifty gold florins were awarded as damages 

for this and some other injuries. A doctor of 

Arts and Medicine obtained a judgment for two 

florins for expenses incurred when the Rector was 

in his house. A student complained that he had 

been denounced as " infamis " in all the Schools 

for not paying his matriculation-fee, and that his 

name had been entered in the book called the 

" Speculum." The Syndics ordered the record of 

his punishment to be erased. The most interesting 

case is that of a student of Civil Law, called Andreas 

Romuli de Lancisca. He averred that he had sold 

Hieronimus six measures of grain, to be paid for 

at the customary price. After four months' delay, 

the Rector paid seven pounds, and when asked to 

complete the payment, gave Andreas a book of 

medicine, " for which I got five florins." Some days 

later he demanded the return of the book, to which 

Andreas replied : " Date mihi residuum et libenter 

restituam librum." To this request the Rector, 

" in superbiam elevatus," answered, " Tu reddes 



LIFE IN THE STUDENT-UNIVERSITIES 37 

librum et non solvam tibi." The quarrel con- 
tinued, and one morning, when Andreas was in the 
Schools at a lecture, Hieronimus sent the servant 
of the Podesta, who seized him " ignominiose et 
vituperose " in the Schools and conducted him to 
the town prison like a common thief. For all these 
injuries Andreas craved redress and a sum of forty 
florins. The damages, he thought, should be high, 
not merely for his personal wrongs, but also for the 
insult to the scholar's dress which he wore, and, 
indeed, to the whole University. He was allowed 
twenty pounds in addition to the sum due for the 
grain. The Syndicate of 1433 must have been an 
extreme case ; matters were complicated by the fact 
that the Rector's brother was " Executor Ordina- 
mentorum Justitise Civitatis Florentiae," and he was 
therefore suspected of playing into the hands of the 
city. But the knowledge that such an investigation 
was possible must have restrained the arbitrary 
tendencies of a Rector. 

A reference to the imitation of the Bolognese 
constitution in Spain must close this portion of our 
survey. At Lerida, in the earliest code of statutes 
(about 1300), we find the doctors and master sworn 
to obey the Rector, who can fine them, though 
he must not expel them without the consent of the 
whole University. Any improper criticisms of the 
Rector (" verba injuriosa vel contumeliosa ") by 



38 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

anyone, of whatsoever dignity, are to be punished 
by suspension until satisfaction is made, and so 
great is the glory of the office (" Rectoris officium 
tanta [excellentia] prsefulget ") that an ex-Rector 
is not bound to take the oath to his successor. 
The regulations affecting undergraduates are more 
detailed than at Bologna, and indicate a stricter 
discipline. After eight days' attendance at a 
doctors lecture, a student must not forsake it to go 
to another doctor ; no scholar is to go to the School 
on horseback unless for some urgent cause ; scholars 
are not to give anything to actors or jesters or other/ 
" truffatores " (troubadours), nor to invite them to 
meals, except on the feasts of Christmas, Easter, and 
Pentecost, or at the election of a Rector, or when 
doctors or masters are created. Even on these 
occasions only food may be given, although an 
ordinance of the second Rector allows doctors and 
masters to give them money. No students, except 
boys under fourteen, are to be allowed to play at 
ball in the city on St Nicholas' day or St Katherine's 
day, and none are to indulge in unbecoming amuse- 
ments, or to walk about dressed up as Jews or 
Saracens — a rule which is also found in the statutes 
of the University of Perpignan. If scholars are 
found bearing arms by day in the students' quarter 
of the town, they are to forfeit their arms, and if 
they are found at night with either arms or musical 



LIFE IN THE STUDENT-UNIVERSITIES 39 

instruments in the students' quarter, they are to 
forfeit arms or instruments. If they are found 
outside their own quarters, by night or by day, with 
arms or musical instruments, the town officials will 
deal with laymen, and the Bishop or the Rector with 
clerks. Laymen might be either students or doctors 
in Spain as in Italy ; at Salamanca, a lecturer's 
marriage was included among the necessary causes 
which excused a temporary absence from his duties. 
In the universities of Southern France, the marriage 
of resident doctors and students was also contem- 
plated, and the statutes of the University of Aix 
contain a table of charges payable as " charivari " 
by a rector, a doctor, a licentiate, a bachelor, a 
student, and a bedel. In each case the amount 
payable for marrying a widow was double the 
ordinary fee. If the bridegroom declined to pay, the 
" dominus promoter," accompanied by " dominis 
studentibus," was, by permission of the Rector, to 
go to his house armed with frying-pans, bassoons, 
and horns, and to make a great tumult, without, 
however, doing any injury to his neighbours. Con- 
tinued recusancy was to be punished by placing 
filth outside the culprit's door on feast-days. In 
the University of Dole, there was a married Rector 
in 1485, but this was by a special dispensation. 
There are traces of the existence of married under- 
graduates at Oxford in the fifteenth century, and, 



40 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

in the same century, marriage was permitted in the 
Faculty of Medicine at Paris, but the insistence upon 
celibacy in the northern universities is one of the 
characteristic differences between them and the 
universities of Southern Europe. 



CHAPTER III 

THE UNIVERSITIES OF MASTERS 

The Guild or Universitas which grew up in the 
Studium Generale of Paris was a Society of masters, 
not of students. The Studium Generale was, in 
origin, connected with the Cathedral Schools, and 
recognition as a Master was granted by the Chancellor 
of the Cathedral, whose duty it was to confer it 
upon every competent scholar who asked for it. 
The successful applicant was admitted by the 
existing masters into their Society, and this ad- 
mission or inception was the origin of degrees in 
the University of Paris. The date of the growth 
of an organised Guild is uncertain ; Dr Rashdall, 
after a survey of the evidence, concludes that " it 
is a fairly safe inference that the period 1150-1170 
— probably the latter years of that period — saw the 
birth of the University of Paris." Such organisa- 
tion as existed in the twelfth century was slight and 
customary, depending, as the student-universities 
of Bologna and in other medieval guilds, upon no 
external authority. The successors of these early 
masters, writing in the middle of the thirteenth 
century, relate how their predecessors, men reverend 

41 



42 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

in character and famous for learning, decided, as 
the number of their pupils increased, that they 
could do their work better if they became a united 
body, and that they therefore formed themselves 
into a College or University, on which Church and 
State conferred many privileges. The bond of 
union they describe as a " jus speciale " (" si quodam 
essent juris specialis vinculo sociati "), and this 
conception explains the appearance of their earliest 
code of statutes in the first decade of the thirteenth 
century. The Guild of masters at Paris, like the 
Guild of students at Bologna, could use with advan- 
tage the threat of a migration, and, after a violent 
quarrel with the town in the year 1200, they received 
special privileges from Philip Augustus. Some years 
later, Pope Innocent III. permitted the " scholars 
of Paris " to elect a procurator or proctor to repre- 
sent their interests in law-suits at Rome. Litiga- 
tion at Rome was connected with disputes with the 
Chancellor of the Cathedral. Already the scholars 
of Paris had complained to the Pope about the 
tyranny of the Chancellor, and Innocent had sup- 
ported their cause, remarking that when he himself 
studied at Paris he had never heard of scholars 
being treated in this fashion. It moved and aston- 
ished the Pope not a little that the Chancellor 
should attempt to exact an oath of obedience and 
payment of money from the masters, and, in the 



THE UNIVERSITIES OF MASTERS 43 

end, that official was compelled to give up his claim 
to demand fees or oaths of fealty or obedience for a 
licence to teach, and to relax any oaths that had 
already been taken. The masters, as Dr Rashdall 
points out, already possessed the weapon of boy- 
cotting, and ordering their students to boycott, 
a teacher upon whom the Chancellor conferred a 
licence against the wish of their guild, but they 
could not at first compel him to grant a licence to 
anyone whom they desired to admit. After the 
Papal intervention of 1212, the Chancellor was 
bound to licence a candidate recommended by the 
masters. 

In the account of their own history, from which 
we have already quoted, the Parisian masters speak 
of their venerable " gignasium litterarum " as 
divided into four faculties, Theology, Law, Medicine, 
and Philosophy, and they compare the four streams 
of learning to the four rivers of Paradise. The 
largest and most important was the Faculty of Arts, 
and the masters of that Faculty were the protagonists 
in the struggle with the Chancellor, a struggle which 
continued long after the intervention of Innocent III. 
In the course of this long and successful conflict, 
the Faculty of Arts developed an internal organisa- 
tion, consisting of four nations, distinguished as the 
French, the Normans, the Picards, and the English. 
Each nation elected a proctor, and the four proctors 



44 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

or other representatives of the nations elected a 
Rector, who was the Head of the Faculty of Arts. 
The division into nations and the title of Rector 
may have been copied from Bologna, but the 
organisation at Paris was essentially different. The 
Parisian nations were governed by masters, not by 
students, and whereas, at Bologna, the artists were 
an insignificant minority, at Paris, the Rector 
became, by the end of the thirteenth century, the 
most powerful official of the University, and, by the 
middle of the fourteenth, was recognised as its Head. 
The superior Faculties of Theology, Canon Law, and 
Medicine, though they possessed independent con- 
stitutions under their own Deans, consisted largely 
of men who had taken a Master's or a Bachelor's 
degree in Arts, and, from the middle of the thirteenth 
century, they took an oath to the Rector, which was 
held to be binding even after they became doctors. 
The non-artist members of these Faculties were not 
likely to be able to resist an authority whose exist- 
ence was generally welcomed as the centre of the 
opposition to the Chancellor. Ultimately, the whole 
University passed under the sway of the Rector, 
and the power of the Chancellor was restricted to 
granting the pis ubique docendi as the representative 
of the Pope. Even this was little more than a 
formality, for the Chancellor " ceased/' says Dr 
Rashdall, " to have any real control over the grant 



THE UNIVERSITIES OF MASTERS 45 

or refusal of Licences, except in so far as he retained 
the nomination of the Examiners in Arts/' 

At Oxford, the University was also a Guild of 
masters, but Oxford was not a cathedral city, and 
there was no conflict with the Bishop or the Chan- 
cellor. In the end of the twelfth or the beginning 
of the thirteenth century, the masters of the Studium 
probably elected a Rector or Head in imitation of 
the Parisian Chancellor. After the quarrel with 
the citizens, which led to the migration to Cambridge, 
and when King John had submitted to the Pope, 
the masters were able to obtain an ordinance from 
the Papal legate determining the punishment of the 
offenders, and providing against the recurrence of 
such incidents. The legate ordered that if the 
citizens should seize the person of a clerk, his sur- 
render might be demanded by " the Bishop of 
Lincoln, or the Archdeacon of the place or his Official, 
or the Chancellor, or whomsoever the Bishop of 
Lincoln shall depute to this office." The clause 
lays stress upon the authority of the Bishop of 
Lincoln, which must in no way be diminished by 
any action of the townsmen. The ecclesiastical 
authority of the Bishop was welcomed by the 
University as a protection against the town, and 
the Chancellor was too far away from Lincoln 
to press the privileges of the Diocese or the 
Cathedral against the clerks who were under his 



46 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

special care. The Oxford Chancellor was a master of 
the Studium, and, though he was the representative 
of the Bishop, he was also the Head of the masters' 
guild, and from very early times was elected by 
the masters. Thus he came to identify himself 
with the University, and his office increased in 
importance as privileges were conferred upon the 
University by kings and popes. No Rectorship 
grew up as a rival to the Chancellorship, though 
some of the functions of the Parisian Rector were 
performed at Oxford by the Proctors. There were 
only two " Nations " at Oxford, for the Oxford 
masters were, as a rule, Englishmen ; men from north 
of the Trent formed the Northern Nation, and the 
rest of England the Southern Nation. Scotsmen 
were classed as Northerners, and Welshmen and 
Irishmen as Southerners. The division into Nations 
was short-lived, and the two Rectors or Proctors, 
though still distinguished as Northern and Southern, 
soon became representatives elected by the whole 
Faculty of Arts. As at Paris, the Faculty of Arts 
was the moving spirit in the University, and Theo- 
logy, Law, and Medicine never developed at Oxford 
any independent organisation. The proctors, as 
Dr Rashdall has shown, thus became the Executive 
of the University as a whole, and not merely of the 
Faculty of Arts. 

An essential difference between Bologna and its 



THE UNIVERSITIES OF MASTERS 47 

two great northern sisters lies in the fact that, at 
Paris and at Oxford, masters and scholars alike were 
all clerks, possessing the tonsure and wearing the 
clerical garb, though not necessarily even in minor 
orders. They could thus claim the privileges of 
ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and at Oxford this juris- 
diction was exercised by the Chancellor, who also, 
along with the proctors, was responsible for academic 
discipline and could settle disputes between 
members of the University. In this, the Univer- 
sity of Oxford had a position of independence which 
Paris never achieved, for though the Parisian 
Rector's court dealt with cases of discipline and 
with internal disputes, criminal jurisdiction re- 
mained the prerogative of the Bishop. In the 
middle of the fourteenth century, royal grants of 
privileges to the University of Oxford culminated 
in the subjection of the city, and from the middle 
of the fifteenth " the burghers lived in their own 
town almost as the helots or subjects of a con- 
quering people/' (Cf. Rashdall, vol. ii. chap. 12, 
sec. 3). The constitution of Oxford was closely 
imitated at Cambridge, where the Head of the 
University was also the Chancellor, and the execu- 
tive consisted of two rectors or proctors. In the 
fifteenth century the University freed itself from the 
ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Bishop of Ely. 
Germany possessed no universities before the 



48 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVEESITY 

fourteenth century. Prague was founded in 1347-8, 
and was followed before 1400 by Vienna, Erfurt, 
Heidelberg, and Cologne, and in the first quarter of 
the next century by Wiirzburg, Leipsic, Rostock, 
and in the Low Countries by Lou vain. The first 
Scottish University dates from the early years of 
the fifteenth century. While the provincial univer- 
sities of France tended to follow Bologna rather than 
Paris as their model, the German universities 
approximated to the Parisian type, and although 
the founders of the Scottish universities were 
impressed by some of the conditions of the student- 
universities, and provided for them a theoretical 
place in their constitutions, yet the three medieval 
Scottish universities of Scotland, in their actual 
working, more nearly resembled the master type.f 



CHAPTER IV 

COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 

We are now in a position to approach the main part 
of our subject — life in a medieval University of 
masters — and we propose to proceed at once to its 
most characteristic feature, life in a medieval 
College. The system originated in Paris. In the 
early days of the University, students at Paris 
lived freely in private houses, which a number of 
" socii " hired for themselves. A record of a 
dispute which occurred in 1336 shows that it was 
usual for one member of such a community to be 
responsible for the rent, " tanquam principalis dictae 
domus," and the member who was held to be re- 
sponsible in the particular case is described as a 
" magister." At first it was not necessary that he 
should be a master, but this soon became usual, 
and ultimately (though not till the close of the 
Middle Ages) it was made compulsory by the Univer- 
sity. Dr Rashdall has drawn attention to the 
democratic character of these Hospicia or Halls, 
the members of which elected their own principal 
and made the regulations which he enforced. This 
democratic constitution is found at Oxford as well 

r> 49 



50 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

as at Paris, and was, indeed, common to all the 
early universities. When a benevolent donor 
endowed one of these halls, he invariably gave it 
not only money, but regulations, and it was the 
existence of an endowment and of statutes imposed 
by an external authority that differentiated the 
College from the Hall. The earliest College founders 
did not necessarily erect any buildings for the 
scholars for whose welfare they provided ; a 
College is essentially a society, and not a building. 
The quadrangular shape which is now associated 
with the buildings of a College was probably sug- 
gested accidentally by the development of Walter 
de Merton's College at Oxford ; but, long after the 
foundation of Merton College in 1263 or 1264, it 
was not considered necessary by a founder to build 
a home for his scholars, who secured a suitable 
lodging-house (or houses) and were prepared to 
migrate should such a step become desirable in the 
interest of the University. 

The statutes of Merton provide us with a picture 
of an endowed Hall at the period when such endow- 
ments were beginning to change the character of 
University life. The conception of a College, as 
distinguished from the older Halls, developed very 
rapidly, and the Founder's provisions for the organisa- 
tion of his society were altered three times within 
ten years. In 1264, Walter de Merton, sometime 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 51 

Chancellor of England, drew up a code of statutes 
for the foundation of a house, to be called the House 
of the Scholars of Merton. His motive was the 
good of Holy Church and the safety of the souls of 
his benefactors and relations, and these objects 
were to be served by providing for the maintenance 
of twenty poor scholars and two or three priests in 
the schools of Oxford, or elsewhere, if learning should, 
in these days of civil war, flourish elsewhere than 
at Oxford. The endowment which he provided 
was to consist of his manors of Maldon and Farleigh, 
in Surrey, to which was added the Merton estate, 
at the end of what are now the " Backs " in 
Cambridge. This was purchased in 1269-70. The 
lands were given to his scholars, to be held under 
certain conditions, in their own name. His own 
kindred were to have the first claim upon places 
in the new Society, and, after them, natives of the 
diocese of Winchester ; they were to have allow- 
ances of forty shillings each per annum, to live 
together in a Hall, and to wear uniform garb in 
token of unity and mutual love. As vacancies 
arose, by death, by admission into a religious 
order, by the acceptance of livings in the Church, or 
by appointments in other callings, they were to be 
filled up, and if the funds of the society permitted, 
the numbers, both of scholars and of priests, were 
to be increased. Scholars who proved to be in" 



52 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

corrigibly idle, or who led evil lives, were to be de- 
prived ; but the sick and infirm were to be treated 
generously, and any of the Founder's kin who 
suffered from an incurable malady, and were in- 
capable of earning an honest living in the Studium 
or elsewhere, were to be maintained till their death. 
It was assumed that the scholars had already re- 
ceived the preliminary training in Latin which was 
necessary for their studies, but provision was made 
for the elementary instruction of poor or orphan 
boys of the Founder's kin, until they were ready to 
enter the University. Once or twice a year all the 
members of the foundation were to meet and say 
mass for their Founder and his benefactors, living 
and dead. The management of the property was 
entrusted to a Warden, who was to reside not at 
Oxford or any other Studium where the Hall 
might happen to be, but at Maldon or Farleigh. 
The Warden was a member of the Society, but had 
no authority over the scholars, except that, in cases 
of disputed elections, he, or the Chancellor or 
Rector of the University where the Hall happened 
to be at the time, was to act on the advice of six or 
seven of the senior scholars, and the senior scholars, 
rather than the Warden, were looked upon by the 
founder as the natural leaders of his Society. Every 
year, eight or ten of the seniors were to go to Surrey 
to stay for eight days to inquire into the manage- 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 53 

merit of their property, and, if at any other time, 
evil rumours about the conduct of the Warden 
reached the Hall, two or three of them were to go 
to investigate. The scholars could, with the con- 
sent of the Patron, the Bishop of Winchester, bring 
about the deposition of the Warden, and elections 
to the W~ardenship were entrusted to the twelve 
seniors. They were to consult the " brothers " 
who assisted the Warden at Merton, and were also 
to obtain the sanction of the Bishop of Winchester. 
These first Merton statutes clearly contemplate 
an endowed Hall, differing from other Halls only 
in the existence of the endowment. Some regula- 
tions are necessary in order that the tenure of the 
property of the Society may be secure and that its 
funds may not be misapplied, and the brief code of 
statutes is directed to these ends. Walter de 
Merton's earliest rules make the minimum of change 
in existing conditions. But the preparation of this 
code of statutes must have suggested to the Founder 
that his generosity gave him the power of making 
more elaborate provisions. The Mendicant Orders 
had already established at Oxford and at Paris 
houses for their own members, and the Monastic 
Orders in France were following the example of the 
Friars. These houses were, of course, governed by 
minute and detailed regulations, and it may have 
seemed desirable to introduce some stricter discipline 



54 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

into the secular halls. At all events, in 1270, Walter 
de Merton took the opportunity of an increase in 
his endowments to issue a code of statutes more 
than twice as long as that of 1264. These new 
statutes mark a distinct advance in the Founder's 
ideal of College life. The Warden becomes a much 
more important factor in the conduct of the Hall 
as well as in the management of the property ; in 
the election and in the expulsion of scholars he is 
given a greater place ; his allowances are increased, 
and his presence at Oxford seems to be implied. 
The scholars are to proceed from Arts to Theology ; 
four or five of them may be permitted to study the 
Canon Law, and the Warden may allow some of 
them to devote some time to the Civil Law. Two 
Sub- Wardens are to be appointed, one at Maldon 
and one in Oxford ; Deans are to watch over the 
morals of the scholars, and senior students are to 
preside over the studies of the freshmen. The 
scholars are to be silent at meals and to listen to a 
reader ; there must be no noise in their chambers, 
and a senior is to be in authority in each chamber, 
and to report breaches of regulations. Conversation 
is to be conducted in Latin. 

We have here the beginnings of a new system of 
University life, and we can trace the tendency 
towards collegiate discipline still more clearly in the 
Founder's statutes of 1274, which are much longer 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 55 

and more elaborate than in 1270. The scholars or 
Fellows are now to obey the Warden, as their 
Superior ; the Deans and the seniors in chambers 
are to bear rule under him and, in the first instance, 
to report to him ; the Sub-Warden is to take his 
place in his absence and to assist him at other 
times ; three Bursars are to help him in the manage- 
ment of the property. The Patron or Visitor may 
inquire into the conduct of the Warden or into any 
accusations brought against him, and has the power 
of depriving him of his office. The W T arden is not 
an absolute sovereign ; the thirteen seniors are 
associated with him in the government of the College, 
and the Sub-Warden and five seniors are to inspect 
his accounts once a year. At the periodical scrutinies, 
when the conduct of all the members of the College 
is to be examined, accusations can be brought 
against him and duly investigated. This custom, 
and others of Walter de Merton's regulations, were 
clearly borrowed from the rules of monastic houses, 
and a company of secular clerks seems to have had 
difficulty in realising that they were bound by them, 
for as early as 1284 the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
who had become the Visitor of the College, had to 
issue a series of orders for the observances of the 
statutes. The Warden and Fellows of Merton had 
permitted the study of medicine : they had inter- 
preted too liberally the permission to study law ; 



56 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

they had increased their own allowances and the 
salaries of their brewer and their cook ; the Fellows 
had resisted the authority of the Warden ; they had 
neglected the attendances at divine service enjoined 
by the Founder, and they had been lax about 
expulsions. The change which Walter de Merton 
had made in a scholar's life was so far-reaching that 
a secular would probably not have shared the 
astonishment of Archbishop Peckham (himself a 
friar) at the unwillingness of the Merton scholars 
to recognise the loss of their traditional freedom. 

The system inaugurated by Walter de Merton 
was destined to have a great development. In the 
document of 1284, Peckham speaks of Merton as a 
" College/' and its Founder was the founder of the 
Oxford College system. Although he repeated in 
his last statutes his permission to move his Society 
from Oxford, he regarded Oxford as its permanent 
home. Now that the civil war was over and England 
at peace, he had, he says, purchased a place of 
habitation and a house at Oxford, " where a Univer- 
sity of students is flourishing." Not only had he 
provided a dwelling-place, he had also magnificently 
rebuilt a parish church to serve as a College-Chapel. 
The example he set was followed both at Oxford and 
at Cambridge, and the rule of Merton became the 
model on which College founders based elaborate 
codes of statutes. English founders generally 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 57 

followed Walter de Merton in making their societies 
self-governing communities, with an external Visitor 
as the ultimate court of appeal., /There were ini 
many colleges " poor boys " who were taught 
grammar, performed menial offices, and were not I 
members, nor always eligible for election as members, 
of the Society ; but as a general rule the Fellows 
or Socii all had a share in the management of the 
affairs of the House. Routine business was fre- 
quently managed by the Head, the officers, and a 
limited number of the Senior Fellows, but the whole 
body of Fellows took part in the election of a new 
Head. A period of probation, varying from one 
year to three, was generally prescribed before an 
entrant was admitted a " full and perpetual " 
Fellow, and during this period of probation he had 
no right of voting. This restriction was sometimes 
dispensed with in the case of " Founder's kin," 
who became" full Fellows at once, and the late Sir 
Edward Wingfield used to boast that in his Fresh- 
man term (1850) he had twice voted in opposition 
to the Warden of New College in a College meeting. 
As in a monastic house, this freedom was combined 
with a strict rule of obedience, and though the 
Head of a medieval College might be irritated by 
incidents of this kind, he possessed great dignity 
and high authority within his domain. As founders 
did more for their students, they expected a larger 



58 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

obedience from them, and attempted to secure it 
by minute regulations ; and the authority of the 
Head of the College increased with the number of 
rules which he was to enforce. The foundation of 
New College at Oxford in 1379 marks the com- 
pletion of the collegiate ideal which had advanced 
so rapidly under the successive constitutions of 
Merton College a hundred years before. William of 
Wykeham, in providing for the needs of his scholars, 
availed himself of the experience of the past and 
created a new model for the future. The Fellows 
of New College were to be efficiently equipped at 
Winchester for the studies of the University, and, as 
we shall see, they were to receive in College special 
instruction in addition to the teaching of the 
University. Their magnificent home included, 
besides their living-rooms, a noble chapel and hall, 
a library, a garden, and a beautiful cloister for 
religious processions and for the burial of the dead. 
King Henry VI. built a still more magnificent house 
for his Cambridge scholars, and his example was 
followed by Henry VIII. The later College-founders , 
as we have said, expected obedience in proportion to 
their munificence, and the simpler statutes of earlier 
colleges were frequently revised and assimilated 
to those of later foundations. We reserve for a 
later section what we have to say about education, 
and deal here with habits and customs. 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 59 

The Merton rule that conversation must be in Latin 
is generally found in College statutes. At Peter- 
house, French might occasionally be spoken, should 
just and reasonable cause arise, but English very 
rarely. At New College, Latin was to be spoken 
even in the garden, though English might be used 
in addressing a layman. At Queen's College, Oxford, 
which was founded by a courtier, French was allowed 
as a regular alternative for Latin, and at Jesus 
College, Oxford, conversation might be in Greek, 
Latin, or Hebrew. In spite of the influence of the 
Renaissance, it seems unlikely that either Greek or 
Hebrew was much used as an alternative to Latin, 
but the Latin-speaking rule had become less rigid, 
and in sixteenth-century statutes more generous 
provision is made for dispensations from it. The 
Latin rule was not merely an educational method ; 
it was deliberately intended to be a check upon con- 
versation. College founders accepted the apostolic 
maxim that the tongue worketh great evil, and 
they were convinced that a golden rule of silence 
was a protection against both ribaldry and quarrels. 
In the later statutes of Clare, the legislator 
recognises that not merely loss of time, but the 
creation of a disposition to be interested in trifles 
can be traced to " frequentes collocutiones," and 
he forbids any meetings in bedrooms (even meetings 
of Masters of Arts) for the purpose of feasting or of 



60 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

talking. If anyone wishes to receive a friend at 
dinner or supper, he must apply to the Master for 
leave, and such leave is to be very rarely given. 
Conversation in Hall was prohibited by the rule 
of silence and by the provision of a reader, which 
we have already found at Merton. The book 
read was almost invariably the Bible. William of 
Wykeham, who was followed in this, as in other 
respects, by later College founders, forbade his 
scholars to remain in Hall after dinner or supper, on 
the ground that they were likely to talk scandal and 
quarrel ; but on great Feast days, when a fire was 
allowed in the Hall, they might sit round and 
indulge in canticles and in listening to poems and 
chronicles and " mundi hujus mirabilia." The 
words of the statute (which reappear in those of 
later colleges) seem to imply that even on winter 
evenings a fire burned in the Hall only on Feast 
days, and the medieval student must have suffered 
severely from cold. There were, as a rule, no fire- 
places in private rooms until the sixteenth century, 
when we find references to them, e.g. in the statutes 
of Corpus Christi College, Oxford ; and the wooden 
shutters which took the place of windows shut out 
the scanty light of a winter day. When a Disputa- 
tion (cf. p. 148) was held in Hall at night, a fire 
was lit, but we are not told how, when there was 
no Disputation or College meeting, the medieval 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 61 

student spent the time between supper and the 
" nightcap " which accompanied Compline. Dinner 
was at ten in the morning and supper at six in the 
evening. Dr Caius, in the middle of the sixteenth 
century, ordered his students to be in bed by eight 
o'clock in the evening, and " early to bed " must 
have been the custom on winter nights in a medieval 
College. ." Early to rise " was the stern law, even 
in the dark mornings, for the student's day began 
at six o'clock, and he must often have listened to 
lectures which commenced in the dark, although 
daAvn overtook the lecturer before he finished his 
long exposition. In early times there was no 
provision for breakfast, and, though the existence 
of such a meal is distinctly contemplated in the 
statutes of Queen's College, Oxford, there is no 
hint of it in those of New College. Probably some 
informal meal was usual everywhere, and was either 
paid for privately or winked at by the authorities. 
The absence of any general provision for breakfast 
led to its being taken in private rooms and not in 
Hall, and this is the humble origin of the College 
breakfast party. 

The number of occupants of a single room varied 
in diiferent colleges. Special provision was made 
in later College statutes for the Head of the College ; 
at New College he was given (for the first time) a 
separate establishment and an allowance of plate 



(32 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

and kitchen utensils ; he was to dine in Hail only on 
some twenty great Feasts of the Church, and to sit 
at a separate table on these occasions. Henry VI. 
followed this precedent at King's, and elsewhere 
we find that the Head of a College is to have " prin- 
cipalem mansionem " with garden and stabling for 
the horses, without which it was not becoming that 
he should travel on College business. It was 
generally the duty of the Head to apportion the 
rooms among other members of the College, and to 
see that the juniors were under proper supervision. 
At Peterhouse, and in many other colleges, there 
were to be two in each chamber. When William of 
Wykeham built on a large scale, he ordered that 
there should be four occupants in the ground-floor 
rooms and three in the first-floor rooms. At King's, 
the numbers were three in ground-floor rooms and 
two in first-floor rooms. At Magdalen, the numbers 
were the same as at New College, but two of the beds 
in the upper rooms and one in the lower were to be 
" lectuli rotales, Trookyll beddys vulgariter appellati." 
Separate beds were usually provided, though some- 
times boys under fourteen or fifteen years of age 
were denied this luxury. The bedrooms were also 
studies ; at Oxford there was no general sitting-room, 
except in monastic colleges, though Cambridge 
College statutes speak of a " parlura," correspond- 
ing to the modern parlour or combination room. 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 63 

Each of the occupants of a room in New College 
was the proprietor of a small window, at which he 
worked, probably at some " study " or desk like the 
old Winchester ' ' toys . ' ' The rooms had four windows 
and four " studiorum loca," and the general type of a 
College chamber, after the foundation of New College, 
was a room with one large window, and two, three, 
or four small windows for " studies/' 

A large proportion of the care of statute-makers 
was devoted to the prohibition of amusements. 
The statutes of Peterhouse forbade dogs or falcons, 
" for if one can have them in the House, all will 
want them, and so there will arise a constant 
howling " to disturb the studious. Dice and chess, 
being forbidden games to clerks, were also pro- 
hibited, and the scholars of Peterhouse were for- 
bidden to frequent taverns, to engage in trade, to 
mix with actors, or to attend theatrical performances. 
These enactments are repeated in later College 
statutes, with such additions as the legislator's 
knowledge of human nature dictated and with 
occasional explanations of some interest in them- 
selves. The keeping of dogs is often described as 
" taking the children's bread and giving it to dogs," 
and the Founder of Queen's College, Oxford, ordered 
that no animals were to be kept under the Fellows' 
rooms, since purity of air is essential for study. 
William of Wykeham expressly forbade chess, 



64 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

which he classed with games leading to the loss 
of money or estate, but King Henry VI., who made 
large use of the statutes of New College, omitted the 
mention of chess from his King's College statutes, 
while he added to Wykeham's denunciation of 
ferrets and hawks, an index expurgatorius of animals 
which included monkeys, bears, wolves, and stags, 
and he expressly forbade nets for hunting or fishing. 
The principle on which modern Deans of colleges 
have sometimes decided that " gramophones are 
dogs " and therefore to be excluded from College, 
can be traced in numerous regulations against 
musical instruments, which disturb the peace essen- 
tial to learning. That the medieval student felt 
the temptations of "ragging" in much the same 
way as his modern successors, appears from many 
threats directed against those who throw stones and 
other missiles to the danger of the buildings. Wyke- 
ham thought it necessary to forbid the throwing 
of stones in Chapel, to the danger of the windows 
and reredos, and for the safety of the reredos he 
prohibited dancing or jumping in the Hall, which is 
• contiguous to the Chapel. Games in the Hall were 
also forbidden for the comfort of the chaplains who 
lived in the rooms underneath. King Henry VI. 
forbade dancing or jumping, or other dangerous and 
improper games in the Chapel, cloister, stalls, and 
Hall of King's College. 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 65 

Other disciplinary regulations common to all 
colleges deal with carrying arms, unpunctuality, 
talking during the reading in Hall or disturbing the 
Chapel services, bringing strangers into College, 
sleeping out of College, absence without leave, 
negligence and idleness, scurrilous or offensive 
language, spilling water in upper rooms to the 
detriment of the inhabitants of the lower rooms, 
and failure to attend the regular " scrutinies " or 
the stated general meetings for College business. 
At these scrutinies, any serious charges against 
members of the Society were considered, and it is 
in keeping with some of the judicial ideas of the 
time that some statutes forbid the accused person 
to have a copy of the indictment against him. 
For contumacy, for grave moral offences, for crimes 
of violence, and for heresy, the penalty was ex- 
pulsion. Less serious offences were punished by 
subtraction of " commons/' i.e. deprivation of allow- 
ances for a day or a week (or longer), or by pecuniary 
fines. When College founders provided clothes as 
well as board and lodging for their scholars, the 
forfeiture of a robe took its place among the penalties 
with which offenders were threatened. The " poor 
boys " who sang in Chapel and waited on the Fellows 
were whipped like boys elsewhere, who were being 
taught grammar, but the birch was unknown as a 
punishment for undergraduates till late in the 



66 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

middle ages. The introduction of corporal punish- 
ment into college life in England may be traced 
by a comparison of William of Wykeham's statutes 
with those of Henry VI. The King's College statute 
" De correctionibus faciendis circa delicta leviora " 
is largely a transcript of a New College statute, 
with the same title, and both contemplate subtrac- 
tion of commons as the regular penalty. But the 
King's College statute contains an additional clause, 
to the effect that scholars and younger Fellows 
may be punished with stripes. In the statutes of 
Magdalen, dated some seventeen years later, William 
of Waynflete returned to the New College form of 
the statute, but he provided that his demys (i.e. 
scholars who received half the commons of a Fellow) 
should be subject to the penalty of whipping in the 
Grammar School. The statutes of Christ's College 
prescribe a fine of a farthing for unpunctuality on 
the part of the scholars studying in the Faculty of 
Arts, and heavier fines for absence, and it is added 
that if the offender be not an adult, a whipping is 
to be substituted for the pecuniary penalty. At 
Brasenose, where the Fellows were all of the stand- 
ing of at least a Bachelor of Arts, the undergraduate 
scholars were subjected to an unusually strict dis- 
cipline, and offenders were to be punished either by 
fines or by the rod, the Principal deciding the 
appropriate punishment in each case. For un- 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 67 

punctuality, for negligence and idleness, for playing, 
laughing, talking, making a noise or speaking 
English in a lecture-room, for insulting fellow- 
students, or for disobedience to his pastors and 
masters, the Brasenose undergraduate was to be 
promptly flogged. Among the crimes for which 
the birch is ordered we find " making odious com- 
parisons," a phrase which throws some light on the 
conversational subjects of sixteenth-century under- 
graduates. The kind of comparison is indicated 
in the statute ; remarks about the country, the 
family, the manners, the studies, and the ability, 
or the person, of a fellow-student must be avoided. 
Similarly, at Jesus College, Cambridge, it is forbidden 
to compare country to country, race to race, or 
science to science, and William of Wykeham and 
other founders had to make similar injunctions. 
The medieval student was distinctly quarrelsome, 
and such records as the famous Merton " scrutiny " 
of 1339, and investigations by College Visitors, 
show that the seniors set the undergraduates a bad 
example. The statutes of Corpus Christi College, 
Oxford, provide for two new penalties. An offend- 
ing undergraduate might be sentenced to feed by 
himself, at a small table in the middle of the Hall, 
and in aggravated cases to the monastic penalty 
of bread and water. An alternative penalty was 
detention in the library at the most inconvenient 



68 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

time (" per horam vel horas cum minime vellet "), 
and the performance of an imposition to be shown 
up in due course. The rough and ready penalty 
of the birch is, however, frequently mentioned in 
the statutes of Corpus and of other sixteenth-century 
Colleges. Cardinal Wolsey thought it proper that 
an undergraduate should be whipped until he had 
completed his twentieth year. At Trinity, Cam- 
bridge (where offenders were sociably flogged before 
the assembled College on Friday evenings) the age 
was eighteen. Dr Caius restricted the rod to 
scholars who were not adult. " We call those 
adults," he says, " who have completed their 
eighteenth year. For before that age, both in 
ancient times and in our own memory, youth was 
not accustomed to wear braccas, being content with 
tibialia reaching to the knees." The stern dis- 
ciplinarian might find an excuse for prolonging the 
whipping age in the Founder's wish that, " years 
alone should not make an adult, but along with 
years, gravity of deportment and good character." 
As late as the foundation of Pembroke College at 
Oxford (1624) whipping is the penalty contem- 
plated for undergraduates under eighteen. But 
when we come to the statutes which were drawn 
up in 1698 with a view to the foundation of Wor- 
cester College, not only is there no mention of the 
birch, but even pecuniary penalties are deprecated 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 69 

for minor offences, for which impositions and 
gating are suggested. 

Minor penalties were enforced by the Head of a 
college, the Vice-Head, the Deans, and, in sixteenth- 
century colleges, by the tutors. By later college 
statutes, these officers received for their personal 
use a portion of the fines they inflicted, and appeals 
were sometimes permitted from an officer to the 
Head, and even to the Chancellor or Vice-Chancellor 
of the University. The oath taken by scholars 
frequently bound them to reveal to the authorities, 
any breach of the statutes, and there are indications 
that members of the College were encouraged to 
report each other's misdeeds. Thus the Master of 
Christ's is to fine anj^one whom he hears speaking 
one complete sentence in English, or anyone whom 
he may know to have been guilty of this offence, 
except in sleeping-rooms or at times when permission 
had been given. 

Oxford and Cambridge Colleges were, as we have 
seen, endowed homes for the education of secular 
clerks. All of them, on entrance, had to have the 
tonsure, and provision was often made for the 
cutting of their hair and beard. At Christ's College, 
there was a regular College barber " qui . . . caput 
et barbam radet ac tondebit hebdomadis singulis." 
They wore ordinary clerical dress, and undue ex- 
penditure on clothes and ornaments was strictly 



70 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

prohibited, e.g. the Fellows of Peterhouse were 
forbidden to wear rings on their fingers " ad inanem 
gloriam et jactantiam." The early founders did 
not insist upon Holy Orders for the Heads or Fellows 
of their colleges, though many of them would 
naturally proceed to the priesthood, but in later 
college statutes all the Fellows were ultimately to 
proceed, at stated times, to Holy Orders and to the 
priesthood, though dispensations for delay might 
be granted, and students of Medicine were sometimes 
excused from the priesthood. When they became 
priests they were, like other priests, to celebrate 
mass regularly in the Chapel, but were not to receive 
payment for celebrations outside the College. As 
mere tonsured undergraduates, they were not, at 
first, subject to regulations for daily attendance at 
divine service ; but later founders were stricter 
in this, as in other matters. Bishop Bateman, who, 
in the middle of the fourteenth century, legislated 
for the infant Gonville College, ordered that every 
Fellow should hear one mass daily and say certain 
prayers, and in his own foundation of Trinity Hall, 
he repeated the injunction. The prescribed prayers 
included petitions for the Founder, or for the repose 
of his soul ; every Fellow of Trinity Hall was to say, 
immediately upon rising in the morning and before 
going to bed at night, the prayer " Rege quaesumus 
Domine," during the Bishop's lifetime, and after 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 71 

his death, " Deus qui inter Apostolicos Sacerdotes," 
and to say the psalm " De profundis claniavi " and 
a " Kurie eleeson " for the repose of the soul of the 
Founder's father and mother, his predecessors in 
the see of Norwich, and after his death for his own 
soul. The ten priests who served the Chapel at 
New College, said masses for the Founder and his 
benefactors, but every Fellow was to attend mass 
every day and to say prayers in his own room, 
morning and evening, including " Rege, quaesumus, 
Domine, Willielmum Pontificem Fundatorem 
nostrum " or, after his death, " Deus qui inter 
Apostolicos sacredotes famulum tuum Fundatorem 
nostrum pontincali dignitate " ; and every day, 
both after High Mass in Chapel, and after dinner 
and supper in Hall, the psalm " De profundis " was 
said. Penalties were prescribed for negligence, and 
as time went on, a whipping was inflicted for absence 
from Chapel, e.g. at Christ's College, and at Balliol, 
for which new statutes were drawn up in 1507. 

Residence in College was continuous throughout 
the year, even during the University vacation, 
which lasted from early in July to the beginning of 
October. Leave of absence might be granted at 
any time in the year, on reasonable grounds, but was 
to be given generally in vacations. General rules 
were laid down for behaviour in keeping with the 
clerical profession during absence, and students on 



72 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

leave were forbidden to frequent taverns or other- 
wise transgress the rules which were binding upon 
them in the University. Occasionally we find 
some relaxation in these strict regulations, as when 
the Founder of Corpus Chris ti at Oxford allows 
" moderate hunting or hawking " when one of his 
scholars is on holiday away from Oxford. The 
same indulgent Founder, after the usual prohibition 
of games in College, allows a game of ball in the 
garden for the sake of healthy exercise. (" Non 
prohibemus tamen lusum pilae ad murum, tabulata, 
aut tegulas, in horto, causa solum modo exercendi 
corporis et sanitatis.") Associations with home 
life were maintained by vacation visits, but the 
influx of " people " to the University was, of course, 
unknown. The ancient statutes of Peterhouse 
permit a woman (even if she be not a relation) to 
talk with a Fellow in the Hall, preferably in the 
presence of another Fellow, or at least, a servant ; 
but the legislator had grave fears of the results 
of such " confabulationes," and the precedent he 
set was not followed. A Fellow or scholar is fre- 
quently permitted by College statutes to entertain 
his father, brother, nephew, or a friend, obtaining 
first the consent of the Head of the College, and 
paying privately for the entertainment, but no 
such guest might sleep in College, and the permission 
is carefully restricted to the male sex. Women 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 73 

were, as a rule, not allowed within a College gate ; 
if it was impossible to find a man to wash clothes, a 
laundress might be employed, but she must be old 
and of unprepossessing appearance. A scholar or 
Fellow of a college had not, however, committed 
himself irrevocably to a celibate life, for marriage is 
included among the " causas rationabiles et hones tas " 
which vacated a fellowship. It was possible, though 
probably infrequent, for a Fellow who had not pro- 
ceeded to Holy Orders to leave the College " uxore 
ducta," giving up his emolument, his clerical dress, 
and the tonsure. Even if a Fellow enjoyed the 
Founder's provision for the long period of his 
course in Arts and Theology, and proceeded in due 
time to Holy Orders, it was not contemplated that 
he should remain a Fellow till his death. 

"... he had geten him yet no benefyce, 
Ne was so worldly for to have offyce," 

says Chaucer, indicating the natural end of a scholar's 
career. He might betake himself to some " ob- 
sequium," and rise high in the service of the king, 
or of some great baron or bishop, and become, like 
one of Wykeham's first New College scholars, Henry 
Chichele, an archbishop and a College founder 
himself. Should no such great career open up for 
him, he can, at the least, succeed to one of the 
livings which the founders of English colleges 
purchased for this purpose. His " obsequium " 



74 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

would naturally lead to his ceasing to reside, and 
so vacate his fellowship, and his acceptance of a 
benefice over a certain value brought about the 
same result. Some such event was expected to 
happen to every Fellow ; unless he happened to be 
elected to the Headship, it was not intended that 
he should grow old in the College, and at Queen's 
College, Oxford, the arbitrary or unreasonable refusal 
of a benefice vacated a Fellowship. The object of 
the College Founder was, that there should never 
be wanting a succession of men qualified to serve 
God in Church and State, and to Chaucer's unworldly 
clerk, if he was a member of a College, there would 
come, in due course, the country living and good- 
bye to the University. But statutes were not always 
strictly observed and the idle life-Fellow, who sur- 
vived to be the scandal of early Victorian days, was 
not unknown in the end of the Middle Ages. 

One of the causes of vacating a fellowship throws 
some light upon the class of men who became 
members of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. The 
opening sentences of founders' statutes usually 
contain some such phrase as " collegium pauperum 
et indigentium scholarium " ; but later sections of 
the statutes contemplate the possibility of their 
succeeding to property — " patrimonium, haeredi- 
tatem, feudumve saeculare, vel pensionem annuam " 
— and if such property exceeded the annual value of 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 75 

a hundred shillings, a Fellowship was ipso facto 
vacated. The " pauperes et indigentes " expressions 
must not be construed too literally ; the Founder 
was establishing a claim to the merits of him that 
considereth the poor, and the language he used 
was part of the ordinary formulas of the time, 
and ought not to be interpreted more strictly than 
the ordinary phrases of legal and Diplomatic docu- 
ments or than the conventional terms of courtesy, 
which begin and conclude a modern letter. That 
an English College Founder wished to give help 
where help was required, is undeniable, but help was 
required by others than the poorest. The advance- 
ment of the study of theology was near the heart 
of every medieval founder, and the study of theology 
demanded the surrender of the best years of a 
man's life, and the extension of the period of educa- 
tion long after he might be expected to be earning 
his own living. A curriculum in the University 
which covered at least sixteen years, and might be 
followed by nothing more remunerative than the 
cure of Chaucer's poor priest, required some sub- 
stantial inducement if it was to attract the best 
men. Canon Law, Civil Law and Medicine, if they 
offered more opportunity of attaining a competency, 
required also a very long period of apprenticeship 
in the University. There were many youths in the 
Middle Ages (as there are to-day) neither " pauperes " 



\ 



76 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

nor " indigentes " in the strict sense of the word, 
but too poor to be able to afford sixteen years of 
study in the University. The length of the medieval 
curriculum produced some of the necessities which 
colleges were established to meet. 

That the founders were not thinking of the 
poorest classes of the community, is evident from 
many provisions of their statutes. They frequently 
provided only board and lodging, and left their 
beneficiaries to find elsewhere the other necessities 
of life ; they appointed penalties (such as the sub- 
traction of commons for a month) which would have 
meant starvation to the penniless ; they contem- 
plated entertainments and journeys, and in the case 
of a New College Doctor, even the maintenance of a 
private servant, at the personal expense of their 
scholars and Fellows ; they prohibited the ex- 
penditure of money on extravagant dress and 
amusements. William of Wykeham made allow- 
ances for the expense of proceeding to degrees 
in the University when one of his Fellows had 
no private means and no friends to assist him 
(" propter paupertatem, inopiam, et penuriam, 
carentiamque amicorum ") ; but the sum to be 
thus administered was strictly limited and the 
recipient had to prove his poverty, and to swear to 
the truth of his statement. The very frequent 
insistence upon provisions for a Founder's kin, 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 77 

suggests that the society, to which he wished a 
large number of his relations to belong, was of higher 
social standing than an almshouse ; and the liberal 
allowances for the' food of the Fellows, as contrasted 
with the sums allotted to servants and choristers, 
show that life in College was intended to be easy 
and comfortable. The fact that menial work was 
to be done by servants and that Fellows were to be 
waited on at table by the " poor boys " is a further 
indication of the dignity of the Society. At New* 
College, it was the special duty of one servant to I 
carry to the schools, the books of the Fellows and I 
scholars. The possession of considerable means 
by a medieval Fellow, is illustrated by two wills, 
printed in " Munimenta Academica." Henry 
Scayfe, Fellow of Queen's College, left in 1449, 
seven pounds to his father, smaller sums to a large 
number of friends, including sixpence to every 
scholar of the College, and also disposed by will of 
sheep, cattle and horses. In 1457, John Seggefyld, 
Fellow of Lincoln College, bequeathed to his brother 
tenements in Kingston by Hull, which had been 
left him by his father, twelve pence to each of his 
colleagues, and thirteen shillings and four pence 
to his executor. Whether the possessions of these 
men ought to have led to the resignation of their 
Fellowships, is a question which may have interested 
their colleagues at the time ; to us the facts are 



78 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

important, as illustrating the private means of 
members of a society of " poor and indigent " 
scholars, and as indicating the class from which 
such scholars were drawn. 

College regulations in other countries add con- 
siderably to our knowledge of medieval student-life. 
In Paris, where the system had its humble beginning 
in the hire of a room for eighteen poor scholars, 
by a benevolent Englishman returning from a pil- 
grimage to Palestine in 1180, the college ideal 
progressed slowly and never reached its highest 
development. Even when most of the students 
of Paris came to live in colleges, the college was 
not the real unit of university life, nor was a Parisian 
college a self-governing community like Merton 
or Peterhouse. The division of the University of 

1 Paris into Nations affected its social life, and the 
Faculties were separated at Paris in a manner 
unknown in England. A college at Paris was 
organised in accordance with Faculty divisions, an 
arrangement so little in harmony with the ideas 
of English founders, that William of Wykeham 
provided that Canonists and Civilists, should be 
mixed in chambers with students of other Faculties 
" ad nutriendam et conservandam majorem dilec- 
tionem, amicitiam et charitatem inter eosdem." 
I As colleges at Paris were frequently confined to 
[ natives of a particular district, they tended to be- 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 79 

come sub-divisions of the Nations. The disadvan- 
tages of restricting membership of a college to a 
diocese or locality, were seen and avoided by the 
founder of the College of Sorbonne, in the middle of 
the thirteenth century, and the founder of the 
sixteenth century College of Mans protested against 
the custom, by instructing his executors to open 
his foundation to men, from every nation and 
province, insisting that association with companions 
of different languages and customs, would make the 
scholars " civiliores, eloquentiores, et doctiores," 
and that the friendships thus formed would enable 
them to render better service to the State. The 
tenure of his bursa or emolument, by a member of a 
Paris college, was so precarious that he could not 
count upon proceeding to a higher Faculty in his 
own college, and the existence of an outside body 
of governors and of Patrons or Visitors, who had the 
power of filling up vacancies further checked the 
growth of corporate feeling and college patriotism. 
The large powers entrusted to an external authority 
made the position of the Head of a college at Paris, 
much less important than at Oxford or Cambridge. 
The differences between English and Parisian 
colleges may best be realised by a reference to the 
statutes of some early Paris founders. About 1268, 
Guillaume de Saone, Treasurer of Rouen, founded 
at Paris the " Treasurer's College " for natives of his 



80 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

own diocese. It was founded for poor clerks, 
twelve of whom were to be scholars in Theology, 
and twelve in Arts. They were to be selected by 
the archdeacons of the Cathedral of Rouen, who 
then resided at Grand-Caux and Petit-Caux, from 
natives of these places, or, failing them, from the 
Diocese of Rouen. The scholars were to have 
rooms and a weekly allowance, not for the whole 
year, but for forty-five weeks from the feast of St 
Dionysius ; no provision was made for the seven 
weeks of the vacation, except for two theologians, 
who were to take charge of the house at Paris. 
The revenues were collected and distributed by the 
Prior of the Hospital of St Mary Magdalen at Rouen, 
and the Archbishop of Rouen was Rector and Patron. 
The students in Arts never formed part of the 
foundation, for the Treasurer almost immediately 
restricted his community to Theologians, and their 
tenure of the endowment was strictly limited to 
two years after obtaining their licence. " For we 
do not wish to grant them anything more, because 
our intention is only to induce them to proceed to the 
degree of master in theology." They were furnished 
with books, which they were forbidden to lend, 
and they were placed under the immediate super- 
intendence of the senior Bursar or Foundationer, 
whose duty it was to call them together once a week, 
and inquire into their conduct and their progress in 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 81 

their studies. Some general rules were laid down 
by the Founder, and offenders against them were 
to be expelled at these meetings. They were 
permitted to receive a peaceful commoner, who 
paid for his chamber and was a student of Theology. 
The interest of the Treasurer of Rouen in Theology 
is characteristic, and the great College of the Sor- 
bonne, founded about the same time, was also re- 
stricted to theologians. The College of Navarre, 
founded in 1304, provided for twenty students of 
grammar, twenty in logic and philosophy (Arts) 
and twenty in Theology, each Faculty forming a 
sub-college, with a separate hall. A doctor in 
grammar was to superintend both the studies and 
the morals of the grammarians and to receive double 
their weekly allowance of four shillings, and similarly, 
a master of Arts was to supervise the Artists and 
receive double their weekly allowance of six shillings. 
The " Dean and University of the masters of the 
scholars of the theological Faculty at Paris " were 
to choose a secular clerk to be Rector of the College, 
and to govern it in conjunction with the body that 
appointed him. The masters of the Faculty of 
Theology, or their representatives, were to visit 
the College annually, to inquire into the financial 
and domestic arrangements, and into the behaviour 
of the Rector, masters, and scholars, and to punish 
as they deemed necessary. Membership of the 



82 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

College was restricted to the kingdom of France. 
Similarly, the College du Plessis, founded in 1322, 
by Geoffrey du Plessis, Notary Apostolic, and 
Secreta^ of Philip the Long, was restricted to 
Frenchmen, with preference to certain northern 
dioceses. Its forty scholars were in separate societies, 
with a Grand Master who had to be a master or, at 
least, a bachelor in Theology. The affairs of the 
College, as far as concerned the election, discipline 
and the deprivation of its members, were to be ad- 
ministered by two bishops and an abbot, in con- 
junction with the Master and with the Chancellor 
of the Cathedral of Paris, or, in the absence of the 
great dignitaries, by the Master and the Chancellor. 
But the financial administration was entrusted to a 
provisor or procurator, who undertook the collection 
and distribution of the revenues. 

The c^tails^aL-CoIlege. statutes at Paris, bear a 
general resemblance to the regulations of Oxford 
and Cambridge founders, and discipline became more 
stringent as time went on. Attendance at Chapel 
(the only meeting-place of students in different 
Faculties in the same College) came to be strictly 
required. Punctuality at meals was frequently 
insisted upon, under pain of receiving nothing but 
bread. Silence was enjoined at meal times and the 
Bible was read. Latin was, from the first, the only 
lawful medium of conversation. All the members 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 83 

of a college, had to be within the gates when the 
curfew bell rang. Bearing arms or wearing unusual 
clothes was forbidden, and singing, shouting and 
games were denounced as interfering with the 
studies of others, although the Parisian legislators 
were more sympathetic with regard to games, 
than their English contemporaries. Even the 
Founder of the Cistercian College of St Bernard, 
contemplated that permission might be obtained for 
games, though not before dinner or after the bell 
rang for vespers. A sixteenth-century code of 
statutes for the College of Tours, while recording the 
complaints of the neighbours about the noise made 
by the scholars playing ball (" de insolentiis, ex- 
clamationibus et ludis palmariis dictorum scolarium, 
qui ludunt . . . pilis durissimis ") permitted the 
game under less noisy conditions (" pilis seu scophis 
mollibus et manu, ac cum silentio et absque clamor- 
ibus tumultuosis "). The use of dice was, as a rule, 
absolutely prohibited, but the statutes of the 
College of Cornouaille permitted it under certain 
conditions. It might be played to amuse a sick 
fellow on feast days, or without the plea of sickness, 
on the vigils of Christmas, and of three Holy Days. 
But the stakes must be small and paid in kind, not 
in money (" pro aliquo comestibili vel potabili "). 

Penalties for minor offences were much the same 
as in England — forfeiture of commons for varying 



84 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

periods, pecuniary fines, and in the sixteenth 
century, whipping. In the College of Le Mans, 
bursars who were not graduates were to be whipped 
for a first offence in a school, and for a second 
offence in the Hall (" prout mos est in universit- 
ate Parisiensi "). The obligation of reporting each 
other's faults, of which there are indications in 
English statutes, was almost universal at Paris, where 
all were bound to reveal offences " sub secreto " 
to the authorities. The penalty of " sconcing/' 
still inflicted at Oxford, for offences against under- 
graduate etiquette, finds a place in the Parisian 
statutes among serious punishments. We find it 
in the Statutes of Cornouaille for minor offences ; 
if a man carries wine out of the College illicitly, he 
is to pay for double the quantity, to be drunk by 
the members who were present at the time ; if 
anyone walks through the confines or chambers in 
pattens (" cum calepodiis, id est cum patinis ") he is 
to be mulcted in a pint of wine. If a stranger is 
introduced without leave (" ad mensam communitatis 
ad comedendum vel videndum secretum mensae "), 
the penalty is a quart of good wine for the fellows 
present in Hall. For unseemly noise, especially at 
meals, and at time of prayers, the ordinary penalty 
is a quart of ordinary wine (" vini mediocris "). For 
speaking in the vernacular, there is a fine of " the 
price of a pint of wine," but, as the usual direction 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 85 

about drinking it, is omitted, this was probably not 
a sconce ; at the Cistercian College, the penalty for 
this offence was a sconce. So far, the offences for 
which a sconce is prescribed, might in most cases, 
be paralleled in more recent times in an English 
college, but the statutes of Cornouaille also make 
sconcing the penalty for striking a servant, unless 
the injury was severe, in which case, more serious 
punishments were imposed. The whole sentence i 
is an illustration of the lack of control over outbursts 
of bad temper, which is characteristic of medieval' 
life. All the scholars are to be careful not to strike 
the servants in anger or with ill-will, or to injure them ; 
he who inflicts a slight injury is to be fined a quart 
of wine ; if the injury be more severe, the master 
is to deprive him of his burse for one day or more, 
at his own discretion and that of a majority of the 
scholars : if there is a large effusion of blood or a 
serious injury, the pro visor (the Bishop of Paris or 
his Vicar General) is to be informed, and to deprive 
the offender of his burse, or even punish him other- 
wise. At the Sorbonne, an assault on a servant was 
to be followed by the drinking of a quart of speci- 
ally good wine by the Fellows, at the culprit/s 
expense ; for talking too loud in Hall, the sconce 
was two quarts (presumably of ordinary wine). 
Dr Rashdall quotes from the MS. Register of the 
Sorbonne, actual instances of the infliction of 



86 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

sconces : "A Doctor of Divinity is sconced a quart 
of wine for picking a pear off a tree in the College 
garden, or again, for forgetting to shut the Chapel 
door, or for taking his meals in the kitchen. Clerks 
are sconced a pint for ' very inordinately ' knock- 
ing ' at the door during dinner . . / for ' con- 
fabulating ' in the court late at night, and refusing 
to go to their chambers when ordered. . . . The 
head cook is sconced for ' badly preparing the 
meat for supper/ or for not putting salt in the 
soup." Among the examples given by Dr Rashdall 
from this source are a sconce of two shillings for 
drunkenness and a sconce in wine inflicted upon the 
head cook for being found " cum una meretrice." 
An offence so serious in a bursar, is by many college 
statutes to be followed by expulsion, and Dr Rashdall 
quotes an instance of this penalty : but Parisian 
College Founders, were less severe in dealing with 
moral offences than English Founders. At the 
monastic College of Marmoutier, it was only on the 
second offence that bringing into College (" mulierem 
suspectam et inhonestam ") led to expulsion, and at 
the College of Cornouaille, the penalty for a first 
offence was loss of commons or bursa for fifteen 
days, and for a second offence a month's deprivation ; 
but even at Cornouaille actual incontinence was to 
be punished by expulsion. 

A late code of statutes of the fourteenth-century 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 87 

College of Dainville, give us a picture^^ajtu^ienL's 
day . The hour of rising was five o'clock, except 
on Sundays and Feast days when an hour's grace was 
allowed. Chapel service began at 5.30, prayers, 
meditation, and a New Testament lesson being 
followed by the mass of the College at six. All 
students resident in the College had to be present. 
The reception of commoners, an early instance of 
which we noted in the College of the Treasurer, 
had developed to such an extent, that all Colleges 
had, in addition to their bursars or foundations, a 
large number of " foranei scholares," who paid 
their own expenses but were subject to College 
discipline, and received a large part of their educa- 
tion in College. After mass, the day's work began ; 
attendance at the Schools and the performance of 
exercises for their master in College. Dinner was 
about twelve o'clock, when either a bursar or an 
external student read, " first Holy Scripture, then a 
book appointed by the master, then a passage from 
a martyrology." After dinner, an hour was allowed 
for recreation — walking within the precincts of the 
College, or conversation — and then everyone went to 
his own chamber. Supper was at seven, with reading 
as at dinner, and the interval until 8.30 was again 
free for " deambulatio vel collocutio." At 8.30 the 
gates of the College were closed, and evening Chapel 
began. Rules against remaining in Hall after supper 



88 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

occur in Parisian as well as in English statutes, and 
we find prohibitions against carrying off wood to 
private rooms. The general arrangement of Parisian 
college chambers, probably resembled those of 
Oxford, or Cambridge, and we find references to 
" studies." The statutes of the monastic college of 
Clugny order that " because the mind is rendered 
prudent by sitting down and keeping quiet, the said 
students at the proper and wonted hours for study 
shall be, and sit, alone in their cells and at their 
studies." Parisian statutes are stricter than English 
statutes in insisting upon frequent inspections of 
students' chambers, and a sixteenth-century code 
for a Parisian college orders the officials to see their 
pupils every night before bed time, and to make 
sure, before they themselves retire for the night, 
that the students are asleep and not wandering 
about the quadrangles. 

Strict supervision is found in colleges in other 
French universities, even in those which belong to 
the student type. It was, of course, especially 
strict in monastic colleges, which carried their own 
customs to the University ; in the College of Notre 
Dame de Pitie, at Avignon, the master of the novices 
lived in a room adjoining their dormitory, and had 
a window, through which he might watch their 
proceedings. Supervision was sometimes connected 
with precautions against fire, e.g. at the College of 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 89 

Saint Ruf, at Montpeilier, an officer was appointed 
every week to go round all chambers and rooms 
at night, and to warn anyone who had a candle or 
a fire in a dangerous position, near his bed or his 
study. He was to carry a pail of water with him 
to be ready for emergencies. A somewhat similar 
precaution was taken in the Collegium Maius at 
Leipsic, where water was kept in pails beside the 
dormitories, and leather pails, some centuries old, 
are still to be seen at Oxford. As a rule, the dormi- 
tories seem to have contained a separate bed for each 
occupant, but in the College of St Nicholas de Pelegry 
at Cahors, students in arts (who entered about the 
age of fourteen) were to sleep two in a bed. Insist- 
ence on the use of Latin is almost universal ; the 
scholars of the College de Foix at Toulouse are 
warned that only ploughmen, swineherds and other 
rustics, use their mother tongues. Silence and the 
reading of the Bible at meals was usual, and students i 
are sometimes told to make their needs known, 
if possible, by signs. Fines for lateness at meals 
are common, and there are injunctions against 
rushing into Hall with violence and greed : no one 
is to go near the kitchen to seize any food, and 
those who enter Hall first, are to wait till the rest 
arrive, and all are to sit down in the proper order. 
Prohibitions against dogs are infrequent in the French 
statutes ; at the College des Douze Medecins at 



90 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

Montpellier, one watchdog was allowed to live in 
College. Women were often forbidden to enter a 
college, " quia mulier caput est peccati, arma dyaboli, 
expulsio paradysi, et corruptio legis an ti quae/' 
The College of Saint Ruf at Montpellier, in the 
statutes of which this formula occurs, did, however, 
allow women to stand in the Chapel at mass, pro- 
vided that they did not enter the choir. The 
monastic institution of Our Lady of Pity at Avignon, 
went so far as to have a matron for the young boys, 
an old woman, entitled " Mater Novitiorum Col- 
legiatorum." At the College of Breuil at Angers, 
a woman might visit the College by day if the 
Principal was satisfied that no scandal could arise. 
Penalties for going about the town in masked 
bands and singing or dancing, occur in many 
statutes, but processions in honour of saints and 
choruses to celebrate the taking of degrees, are 
sometimes permitted. Blasphemy and bad language 
greatly troubled the French statute-makers, and 
there are many provisions against blaspheming the 
Blessed Virgin. At the College of Breuil at Angers, 
a fine of twopence, was imposed for speaking or 
singing " verba inhonesta tarn alte," especially in 
public places of the College ; in Germany, the Col- 
legium Minus at Leipsic provides also against 
writing " impudentia dicta " on the walls of the 
College. The usual penalties for minor offences 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 91 

are fines and subtraction of commons : references to 
flogging are rare, though it is found in both French 
and German colleges. More serious crimes were 
visited with suspension and expulsion. At the 
College of Pelegry, at Cahors, to enter the college by 
a window or otherwise after the great gate was 
closed, involved rustication for two months for the 
first offence, six months for the second offence, 
and expulsion for a third. At the College de Verdale, 
at Toulouse, expulsion was the penalty for a list of 
crimes which includes theft, entering the college 
by stealth, breaking into the cellar, bringing in a 
meretrix, witch-craft, alchemy, invoking demons 
or sacrificing to them, forgery, and contracting 
" carnale vel spirituale matrimonium." 

We may close our survey of the Medieval College, 
with a glimpse of a French college in the fourteenth 
century. We have the record of a visitation of the 
Benedictine foundation of St Benedict, at Mont- 
pellier, partly a monastery and partly a college. The 
Prior is strictly questioned about the conduct of the 
students. He gives a good character to most of 
them : but the little flock contained some black 
sheep. Peter is somewhat light-headed (" aliquan- 
tulum est levis capitis ") but not incorrigible ; he has 
been guilty of employing "verba injuriosa et'pro- 
vocativa," but the Prior has corrected him, and he 
has taken the correction patiently. Bertrand's 



92 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

life is " aliquantulum dissoluta," and he has made 
a conspiracy to beat (and, as some think, to kill) 
Dominus Savaricus, who had beaten him along 
with the rest, when he did not know his lessons. 
(Bertrand says he is eighteen and looks like twenty- 
one, but this is a monastic college and the beating 
is monastic discipline.) The Prior further reports 
that Bertrand is quarrelsome ; he has had to make 
him change his bed and his chamber, because the 
others could not stand him ; he is idle and often 
says openly, that he would rather be a " claus- 
tralis " than a student. Breso is simple and easily 
led, and was one of Bertrand's conspirators. William 
is " pessimae conversationis " and incorrigible, 
scandalous in word and deed, idle and given to 
wandering about the toAvn. Correction is vain in 
his case. After the Prior has reported, the students 
are examined viva voce upon the portions of the 
decretals, which they are studying, and the results 
of the examination bear out generally the Prior's 
views. Bertrand, Breso and William, are found to 
know nothing, and to have wasted their time. The 
others acquit themselves well, and the examiners 
are merciful to a boy who is nervous in viva voce, 
but of whose studies Dominus Savaricus, who has 
recovered from the attack made upon him, gives a 
good account. Monks, and especially novices, were 
human, and the experience of St Benedict's at 



COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 93 

Montpellier was probably similar to that of secular 
colleges in France and elsewhere. Even in de- 
mocratic Bologna, it was found necessary in the 
Spanish College (from the MS. statutes of which, 
Dr Rashdall quotes) to establish a discipline which 
included a penalty of five days in the stocks and a 
meal of bread and water, eaten sitting on the floor 
of the Hall, for an assault upon a brother student ; 
if blood was shed, the penalty was double. The 
statutes of the Spanish College were severe for the 
fourteenth century, and they penalise absence from 
lecture, unpunctuality, nocturnal wanderings and 
so forth, as strictly as any English founder. 



CHAPTER V 

UNIVERSITY DISCIPLINE 

The growing tradition of strict college discipline 
ultimately led to disciplinary statutes in the univer- 
sities. From very early times, universities had, of 
course, made regulations about the curriculum, and 
the border-line between a scholar's studies and his 
manners and morals, could not be absolutely fixed. 
At Paris, indeed, it is not until the fifteenth century 
that we find any detailed code of disciplinary 
statutes ; but fourteenth-century regulations about 
dress were partly aimed at checking misdeeds of 
students disguised as laymen, and in 1391 the 
English Nation prohibited an undue number of 
" potationes et convivia," in celebration of the 
" jocund advent " of a freshman or on other occa- 
sions. It was not till the middle of the fifteenth 
century that the University of Paris, awoke to the 
realisation of its own shortcomings in manners and 
morals ; Cardinal William de Estoutville was 
commissioned by Nicholas V. to reform it, and in- 
ternal reform, the necessity of which had been 
recognised for some years, began about the same 
time with an edict of the Faculty of Arts ordering 

94 



UNIVERSITY DISCIPLINE 95 

a general improvement, and especially forbidding 
the celebration of feasts " cum mimis seu instru- 
ments altis." Estoutville's ordinances are largely 
concerned with the curriculum, he was at least as 
anxious to reform the masters as the pupils, and his 
exhortations are frequently in general or scriptural 
terms. The points of undergraduate discipline on 
which he lays stress are feasting, dressing impro- 
perly or wearing the clothes of laymen, quarrelling, 
and games and dances " dissolutas et inhonestas." 
/Four masters or doctors are to inspect annually the 
colleges and pedagogies, in which the students live, 
and are to see that proper discipline is maintained. 
From time to time, similar regulations were made 
by the Faculty of Arts, e.g. in 1469, it is ordered 
that no student is to wear the habit of a fool, except 
for a farce or a morality (amusements permitted at 
this period). Any one carrying arms or wearing 
fools' dress is to be beaten in public and in his own 
hall. These last regulations are doubtless connected 
with town and gown riots, for which the Feast of 
Fools afforded a tempting opportunity. 

The absence of disciplinary regulations in the 
records of the University of Paris, is largely to be 
explained by the fact that criminal charges against 
Parisian scholars were tried in the Bishop's Court, 
and civil actions in the Court of the Provost of 
Paris. At Oxford, where the whole jurisdiction 



96 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

belonged to the Chancellor of the University, dis- 
ciplinary statutes are much more numerous. We 
find, from the middle of the thirteenth century on- 
wards, a series of edicts against scholars who break 
the peace or carry arms, who enter citizens' houses 
to commit violence, who practise the art of sword 
and buckler, or who are guilty of gross immorality. 
A statute of 1250 forbids scholars to celebrate their 
national feast days disguised with masks or gar- 
lands, and one of 1313 restricts the carrying of arms 
to students who are entering on, or returning from, 
long journeys. Offenders who refuse to go to 
prison, or who escape from it, are to be expelled. 
As early as the middle of the thirteenth century, 
it was the duty of the proctors and of the principals 
of halls, to investigate into, and to report the mis- 
deeds of scholars who broke the rules of the Univer- 
sity or lived evil lives. A list of fines drawn up in 
1432 (a period when in the opinion of the University 
a pecuniary penalty was more dreaded than anything 
else) prescribes fines of twelve pence for threatening 
violence, two shillings for wearing arms, four shillings 
for a violent shove with the shoulders or a blow 
with the fist, six shillings and eight pence for a blow 
with a stone or stick, ten shillings for a blow with 
a sword, a knife, a dagger or any similar " bellicose 
weapon/' twenty shillings for carrying bows and 
arrows with evil intent, thirty shillings for collecting 



UNIVERSITY DISCIPLINE 97 

an assembly to break the peace, hinder the execution 
of justice, or make an attack upon anyone, and forty 
shillings for resisting the execution of justice or 
wandering about by night. In every case damages 
have also to be paid to any injured person. The 
device of overaweing a court (familiar in Scottish 
history) is prohibited by a regulation that no one 
shall appear before the Chancellor with more than 
two companions. 

The records of the Chancellor's Court furnish us 
with instances of the enforcement of these regula- 
tions. In 1434, a scholar is found wearing a dagger 
and is sentenced to be " inbocardatus," x i.e. im- 
prisoned in the Tower of the North Gate of the city, 
and another offender, in 1442, suffers a day's im- 
prisonment, pays his fine of two shillings, and for- 
feits his arms. In the same year, John Hordene, a 
scholar of Peckwater Inn, is fined six shillings and 
eightpence for breaking the head of Thomas Walker, 
manciple of Pauline Hall, and Thomas Walker is 
fined the like sum for drawing his sword on Hordene 
and for gambling. In 1433, two scholars, guilty 
of attacking Master Thomas Rygby in Bagley Wood 
and stealing twelve shillings and sevenpence from 
him, fail to appear, and are expelled from the 
University, their goods (estimated to be worth about 

1 The prison was called "Bocardo " because, like the mood known 
as " Bocardo " in the syllogism, it was difficult to get out of. 

G 



98 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

thirteen shillings) being confiscated. In 1457, four 
scholars are caught entering with weapons into a 
warren or park to hunt deer and rabbits ; they 
are released on taking an oath that, while they are 
students of the University, they will not trespass 
again in closed parks or warrens. In 1452, a 
scholar of Haburdaysh Hall is imprisoned for using 
threatening language to a tailor, and is fined twelve- 
pence and imprisoned ; the tailor insults the prisoner 
and is fined six shillings and eightpence. We 
have quoted instances of undergraduate offences, 
but the evil-doers are by no means invariably young 
students, e.g. in 1457 the Vicar of St Giles has to 
take an oath to keep the peace, his club is forfeited, 
and he is fined two shillings ; and in the same year 
the Master of St John's Hospital, who has been 
convicted of divers enormous offences, is expelled 
the University for breaking prison. 

The increased stringency of disciplinary regula- 
tions at Oxford in the end of the medieval period 
is best illustrated by the statutes which, in the 
fifteenth century, the University enforced upon 
members of the unendowed Halls. Students who 
were not members of a College lived, for the most 
part, in one of the numerous Halls which, up to the 
Reformation, were so important a feature of the 
University. A code of these statutes, printed for 
the first time by Dr Rashdall, shows that the liberty 



UNIVERSITY DISCIPLINE 99 

of the earlier medieval undergraduate had largely 
disappeared, and that the life of a resident in a 
Hall, in the end of the fifteenth century, was almost 
as much governed by statute and regulation as if 
he were the partaker of a founder's bounty. He 
must hear mass and say matins and vespers every 
day, under pain of a fine of a penny, and attend 
certain services on feast days. His table manners 
are no longer regulated by the customs and etiquette 
of his fellows, but by the rules of the University. 
His lapses from good morals are no longer to be 
visited with penalties imposed by his own society ; 
if he gambles or practises with sword and buckler, 
he is to pay fourpence ; if he sins with his tongue, 
or shouts or makes melody when others wish to 
study or sleep, or brings to table an unsheathed 
knife, or speaks English, or goes into the town or 
the fields unaccompanied by a fellow-student, he 
is fined a farthing ; if he comes in after 8 p.m. in 
winter or 9 p.m. in summer, he contracts a gate bill 
of a penny ; if he sleeps out, or puts up a friend for 
the night, without leave of his Principal, the fine is 
fourpence ; if he sleeps with another student in 
the Hall but not in his own bed, he pays a penny ; 
if he brings a stranger to a meal or a lecture or any 
other " actum communem " in the Hall, he is fined 
twopence ; if he is pugnacious and offensive and 
makes odious coniparisons, he is to pay sixpence ; 



100 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

if he attacks a fellow-member or a servant, the 
University has appointed penalties varying with the 
severity of the assault, and for a second offence 
he must be expelled. He has to obey his Principal 
much as members of a College obey their Head, and, 
in lieu of the pecuniary penalties, the Principal 
may flog him publicly on Saturday nights, even 
though his own master may certify that he has 
already corrected him, or declare his willingness 
to correct him, for his breaches of the statutes. 
The private master or tutor was, as Dr Rashdall 
suggests, probably a luxury of the rich boy, to whom 
his wealth might thus bring its own penalty. 

It is startling to the modern mind to find Univer- 
sity statutes and disciplinary regulations forbidding 
not only extravagant and unbecoming dress, but 
sometimes also the wearing of distinctive academic 
costume by undergraduates, for distinctive academic 
costume was the privilege of a graduate. The 
scholar wore ordinary clerical dress, unless the 
Founder of a College prescribed a special livery. 
The master had a cappa or cope, such as a Cambridge 
Vice-Chancellor wears on Degree Days, with a 
border and hood of minever, such as Oxford proctors 
still wear, and a biretta or square cap. In 1489, 
the insolence of many Oxford scholars had grown 
to such a pitch that they were not afraid to wear 
hoods in the fashion of masters, whereas bachelors, 



UNIVERSITY DISCIPLINE 101 

to their own damnation and the ruin of the Univer- 
sity, were so regardless of their oaths as to wear 
hoods not lined throughout with fur. Penalties 
were prescribed for both kinds of offenders ; but 
though the Oxford undergraduate never succeeded 
in annexing the hood, he gradually acquired the 
biretta, which his successor of to-day is occasionally 
fined for not wearing. The modern gown or toga 
is explained by Dr Rashdall as derived from the 
robe or cassock which a medieval Master of Arts 
wore under his cappa. 

The disciplinary regulations of fifteenth- and 
sixteenth-century Oxford may be paralleled from 
other universities. At Lou vain there was a kind 
of proctorial walk undertaken by the University 
official known as the Promotor. On receiving 
three or four hours' notice from the Rector, the 
Promotor, with a staff of servants, perambulated the 
streets at night, and he and his " bulldogs " received 
a fine from anyone whom they apprehended. 
Offending students caught in flagrante delicto he 
conducted to the University prison, and others he 
reported to the Rector. " Notabiles personam " 
might be incarcerated in a monastery incorporated 
with the University. Arms found upon anyone 
were forfeited. The Promotor was also the Univer- 
sity gaoler, and was responsible for the safe custody 
of prisoners, and he might place in fetters dangerous 



102 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

prisoners or men accused of serious crimes. Inter- 
views with captives had to take place in his 
presence ; male visitors had to give up their knives 
or other weapons before being admitted, and female 
visitors had to leave their cloaks behind them. 
Students were forbidden to walk in the streets at 
night after the bell of St Michael's Church had been 
rung at nine o'clock in winter, and ten o'clock in 
summer, unless they were accompanied by a doctor 
or a " gravis persona " and were bearing a torch or 
lantern. The list of offences at Lou vain are much 
the same as elsewhere, but an eighteenth-century 
code of statutes specially prohibits bathing and 
skating. The laws against borrowing and lending 
were unusually strict, and no student under twenty- 
five years was allowed to sell books without the 
consent of his regent, the penalty for a sixteenth- 
century student in Arts being a public flogging in 
his own college. 

At Leipsic, the University was generally respon- 
sible for the discipline, sometimes even when the 
offences had been committed in the colleges ; and a 
record of the proceedings of the Rector's Court from 
1524 to 1588, which was published by Friedrich 
Zarncke, the learned historian of Leipsic, gives us 
a large variety of incidents of University life in 
sixteenth-century Germany. Leipsic possessed a 
University prison, and we find, in 1524, two students, 



UNIVERSITY DISCIPLINE 103 

Philippus Josnian and Erasmus Empedophillus, 
who had quarrelled, and insulted each other, sen- 
tenced to perform, in the prison, impositions for the 
Rector. Six or eight days' imprisonment is a fre- 
quent penalty for a drunken row. A college official 
brings to the Rector's Court in 1545 one of his 
pupils, John Ditz, who had lost much money by 
gambling. Ditz and one of his friends, Caspar 
Winckler, who had won six florins and some books 
from him, have already been flogged by their pre- 
ceptors : they are now sentenced to imprisonment, 
but as the weather is very cold, they are to be 
released after one day's detention, and sent back 
to their preceptors to be flogged again. Their 
companions are sentenced to return any money, 
books or garments which they had won in gambling 
games. A student of the name of Valentine Muff 
complains to the Rector that his pedagogue has 
beaten and reproved him undeservedly : after an 
inquiry he is condemned to the rods " once and 
again." For throwing stones at windows a student 
is fined one florin in addition to the cost of replacing 
them. For grave moral offences fines of three 
florins are imposed, and the penalty is not infre- 
quently reduced. A month's imprisonment is the 
alternative of the fine of three florins, but if the 
weather is cold, the culprit, who has been guilty 
of gross immorality, is let off with two florins. A 



104 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

drunken youth who meets some girls in the evening 
and tries to compel them to enter his college, iS 
sentenced to five days' imprisonment, but is re- 
leased on the intercession of the girls and many 
others. An attack on a servant with a knife is 
punished by forfeiture of the knife and a fine of 
half a florin, and a penalty of a florin (divided among 
the four victims) is inflicted for entering a house 
with arms and wounding the fingers of some of its 
inhabitants. A ruffian of noble birth, who had been 
guilty of gross immorality and of violence, declines 
to appear in the Rector's Court, and is duly sentenced 
to expulsion. But his father promises to satisfy 
the University and the injured party, and seven 
nobles write asking that he should be pardoned, 
and a compromise is made, by which he appears in 
court and pays a fine. For the University offence 
of having as an attendant a boy who is not enrolled, 
Valentine Leo is fined three florins, which were paid. 
" But since he appeared to be good and learned, 
and produced an excellent specimen of his singular 
erudition, and wrote learned verses and other com- 
positions to the Rector and his assessors, by which 
he begged pardon and modestly purged his offence, 
and especially as a doctor, whose sons he taught, 
and others interceded for him, he easily procured 
that the florins should be returned to the doctor 
who had paid them for him." 



UNIVERSITY DISCIPLINE 105 

The leniency of the punishments for grave moral 
offences, as contrasted with the strict insistance 
upon the lesser matters of the law, cannot fail to 
impress modern readers, but this is not a character- 
istic peculiar to Leipsic. Fines, and in the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries, whippings were frequently 
inflicted in all universities for violent attacks upon 
the person. Dr Rashdall quotes a case at Ingolstadt 
where a student who had killed another in a drunken 
bout was let off with the confiscation of his goods, 
and the penalty of expulsion was remitted ; and the 
eighteenth-century history of Corpus Christi College 
at Oxford supplies more recent instances of punish- 
ments which could scarcely be said to fit the crime. 

The statutes of the French universities outside 
Paris and of the three medieval Scottish univer- 
sities (St Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen) supply 
many illustrations of the regulations we have 
noted elsewhere, but contain little that is unusual. 
St Andrews, which allowed hawking, forbade the 
dangerous game of football. The Faculty of Arts 
at Glasgow in 1532 issued an edict which has a 
curious resemblance to the Eton custom of " shirk- 
ing." Reverence and filial fear were so important, 
said the masters, that no student was to meet the 
Rector, the Dean, or one of the Regents openly in 
the streets, by day or by night ; immediately he 
was observed he must slink away and escape as 



1,06 LIFE IN/iTHE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 



best he could, and he must not be found again in the 
streets without special leave. The penalty was a 
public, flogging. Similarly, even a lawful game must 
not be played in the presence of a regent. Flogging 
was a recognised penalty in all the Scottish univer- 
sities ; it found its way into the system at St Andrews 
and Glasgow, and was introduced at once at Aberdeen. 
The early statutes of Aberdeen University (King's 
College) unfortunately exist only in the form in which 
they were edited in the seventeenth century. They in- 
clude a rhymed series of rules for behaviour at table, 
which, though post-medieval in date, give us some 
clue to the table manners of the medieval students : — 

Majorem ne praevenia- \ 

Locum assignatum tenea- 
Mensae assignatae accumba- 
Manibus mundis nudis eda- 
Aperientes caput faciem ne obtega- 
Vultus hilares habea- 
Rite in convictu comeda- 
Sal cultello capia- 
Salinum ne dejicia- 
Manubrium haud aciein porriga- 
Tribus cibos digitis prehenda- 
Cultro priusquam dente tera- 

Ossa in orbem depona- 
Vel pavimentum jacia- 
Modeste omnia facia- 
Ossa si in con vivas jacia- 
Nedum si illos vulnera- 
Ne queramini si vapula- 



UNIVERSITY DISCIPLINE 107 



Post haustum labia deterga- 
Modicum, sed crebro biba- 



Os ante haustum evacua- 

Ungues sordidulos fugia- V ,. 

Ructantes terga reflecta- 
Ne scalpatis cavea- 



Edere mementote ut viva- 
Non vivere ut comed- 



The Economist's accounts at Aberdeen have been 
preserved for part of the year 1579, and show that the 
food of a Scottish student, just after the medieval 
period, consisted of white bread, oat bread, beef, 
mutton, butter, small fish, partans (crabs), eggs, 
a bill of fare certainly above the food of the lower 
classes in Scotland at the time. The drinks men- 
tioned are best ale, second ale, and beer. His 
victuals interested the medieval student ; the con- 
versation of two German students, as pictured in a 
"students' guide" to Heidelberg (c/. p. 116), is 
largely occupied with food. " The veal is soft and 
bad : the calf cannot have seen its mother three 
times : no one in my country would eat such stuff : 
the drink is bitter." The little book shows us the 
two students walking in the meadows, and when 
they reach the Neckar, one dissuades the other 
from bathing (a dangerous enterprise forbidden in 



108 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

the statutes of some universities, including Lou vain 
and Glasgow). They quarrel about a book, and 
nearly come to blows ; one complains that the other 
reported him to the master for sleeping in lecture. 
Both speak of the " mpi," the spies who reported 
students using the vernacular or visiting the kitchen. 
The " wolves " were part of the administrative 
machinery of a German University ; a statute of 
Leipsic in 1507 orders that, according to ancient 
custom, " lupi " or " signatores " be appointed to 
note the names of any student who talked German 
(" vulgarisantes ") that they might be fined in 
due course, the money being spent on feasts. One 
of the two Heidelberg students complains of having 
been given a " signum " or bad mark " pro sermone 
vulgariter prolato," and the other has been caught 
in the kitchen. They discuss their teachers ; one 
of them complains of a lecture because " nimis 
alta gravisque materia est." The little book gives, 
in some ways, a remarkable picture of German 
student life, with its interests and its temptations ; 
but it raises more problems than it solves, and affords 
a fresh illustration of the difficulty of attempting 
to recreate the life of the past. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE JOCUND ADVENT 

The medieval student began his academic career 
with an initiation ceremony which varied in different 
countries and at different dates, but which, so far 
as we know, always involved feasting and gener- 
ally implied considerable personal discomfort. The 
designation, " bejaunus " or bajan, which signifies 
yellow-beak (" bee jaune "), seems to have been given 
almost everywhere to the freshman, and the custom 
of receiving the fledgeling into the academic society 
was, towards the close of the Middle Ages, no mere 
tradition of student etiquette, but an acknowledged 
and admitted academic rite. The tradition, which 
dates from very early times, and which has so many 
parallels outside University history, was so strong 
that the authorities seem to have deemed it wisest 
to accept it and to be content with trying to limit 
the expense and the " ragging " which it entailed. 
We have no detailed knowledge of the initiation 
of the Parisian student, but a statute made by the 
University in 1342 proves that the two elements 
of bullying the new-comer and feasting at his expense 
were both involved in it. It relates that quarrels 

109 



110 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

frequently arise through the custom of seizing the 
goods of simple scholars on the occasion of their 
" bejaunia," and compelling them to expend on 
feasting the money on which they intended to live. 
Insults, blows, and other dangers are the general 
results of the system, and the University orders that 
no one shall exact money or a^thing else from 
bajans except the " socii " with whom they live, 
and they may take only a free-will offering. Bajans 
are to reveal, under heavy penalties, the names of 
any who molest them by word or blow, threatening 
them or offering them insults. Offenders are to be 
handed over to the Provost of Paris to be punished, 
but not " ad penam sanguinis." 

A fifteenth-century code of statutes of the Cister- 
cian College at Paris (generally much less stern 
than one would expect in a house of that severe 
Order) refers to the traditions that had grown up 
in the College about the initiation of a bajan, and 
to the " insolentias et enormitates multas " which 
accompanied their observance. The whole of the 
ceremonies of initiation are therefore forbidden — 
" omnes receptiones noviter venientium, quos 
voluntaria opinione Bejanos nuncupare solent, cum 
suis consequentiis, necnon bajulationes, fibrationes 

. . tarn in capitulo, in dormitorio, in parvis 
scholis, in jardinis, quam ubiubi, et tarn de die 
quam de nocte." With these evil customs is to go 



THE JOCUND ADVENT 111 

the very name of the Abbas Bejanorum, and all 
" vasa, munimenta, et instrumenta " used for these 
ceremonies are to be given up. New-comers in 
future are to be entrusted to the care of discreet 
seniors, who will instruct them in the honourable 
customs of the College, report their shortcomings 
in church, in walks, and in games, supervise their 
expenditure, and prevent their being overcharged 
" pro jocundo adventu " or in other ways. So 
strong was the tradition of the " jocund advent " 
that it thus finds a place even in a reformer's con- 
stitution, and we find references to it elsewhere in 
the statutes of Parisian colleges. An undated early 
code, drawn up for the Treasurer's College, orders 
the members to fulfil honestly their jocund advent 
in accordance with the advice of their fellow students. 
At Cornouaille, the new-comer is instructed to pay 
for his jocund advent neither too meanly nor with 
burdensome extravagance, but in accordance with 
his rank and his means. At the College of Dainville 
the expense of the bajan-hood is limited to a quart 
of good wine (" ultra unum sextarium vini non 
mediocris suis sociis pro novo suo ingressu seu 
bejanno non solvat "). At the College of Cambray, 
a bursar is to pay twenty shillings for utensils, and 
to provide a pint of good wine for the fellows then 
present in hall. Dr Rashdall quotes from the Register 
of the Sorbonne an instance in which the Abbot of the 



112 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

Bajans was fined eight shillings (to be expended in 
wine) because he had not fulfilled his duties in regard 
to the cleansing of the bajans by an aspersion of 
water on Innocents' Day. The bajans were not 
only washed, but carried in procession upon asses. 

The statutes of the universities of Southern France, 
and especially of Avignon and Aix, give us some 
further information, and we possess a record of the 
proceedings at Avignon of the Court of the Abbot 
of the Bajans, referred to in the passage we have 
quoted from the regulations of the Cistercian College 
at Paris. Similar prohibitions occur in other 
College statutes. 

At Avignon, the Confraternity of St Sebastian 
existed largely for the -purgation of bajans and the 
control of the abuses which had grown up in con- 
nection with the jocund advent. One of its statutes, 
dated about 1450, orders that no novice, commonly 
called a bajan, shall be admitted to the purgation 
of his sins or take the honourable name of student 
until he has paid the sum of six grossi as entrance 
money to the Confraternity. There is also an 
annual subscription of three grossi, and the payment 
of these sums is to be enforced by the seizure of 
books, unless the defaulter can prove that he is 
unable to pay his entrance fee or subscription, as 
the case may be. The Prior and Councillors of the 
Fraternity have power to grant a dispensation on 



THE JOCUND ADVENT 113 

the ground of poverty. After providing his feast, 
and taking an oath, the bajan is to be admitted 
" jocose et benigne," is to lose his base name, and 
after a year, is to bear the honourable title of student. 
Noblemen and beneficed clergy are to pay double. 
The bajan is implored to comply with these regula- 
tions " corde hilarissimo," and his " socii " are adjured 
to remember that they should not seek their own 
things but the things of Christ, and should therefore 
not spend on feasts anything over six grossi paid 
by a bajan, but devote it to the honour of God and 
St Sebastian. The Court of the Abbot of the 
Bajans, at the College of Annecy, in the same Univer- 
sity, throws a little more light on the actual ceremony 
of purgation. The bajans are summoned into the 
Abbot's Court, where each of them receives, pro 
for?na, a blow from a ferule. They all stand in the 
Court, with uncovered heads and by themselves 
(" Mundus ab immundo venit separandus ") ; under 
the penalty of two blows they are required to keep 
silence (" quia vox funesta in judiciis audiri non 
debet/') The bajan who has patiently and honestly 
served his time and is about to be purged, is given, 
in parody of an Inception in the University, a 
passage in the Institutes to expound, and his fellow - 
bajans, under pain of two blows, have to dispute 
with him. If he obtains licence, the two last-purged 
bajans bring water " pro lavatione et purgatione." 

H 



114 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

The other rules of the Abbot's Court deal with the 
duties to be performed by the youngest freshman 
in Chapel (and at table if servants are lacking), and 
order bajans to give place to seniors and not to go 
near the fire in hall when seniors are present. No 
one, either senior or freshman, is to apply the term 
" Domine " to a bajan, and no freshman is to call 
a senior man a bajan. The Court met twice a 
week, and it could impose penalties upon senior 
men as well as bajans, but corporal punishment is 
threatened only against the " infectos et fetidis- 
simos bejannos/' 

At Aix, a fifteenth-century code of statutes orders 
every bajan to pay fees to the University, and to 
give a feast to the Rector, the Treasurer, and the 
Promotor. The Rector is to bring one scholar 
with him, and the Promotor two, to help " ad pur- 
gandum bejaunum," and the bajan is to invite a 
bedel and others. Dispensations on the ground of 
poverty could be obtained from the Rector, and 
two or three freshmen might make their purgation 
together, " cum infinitas est vitanda," even an 
infinity of feasts is to be avoided. The Promotor 
gives the first blow with a frying-pan, and the 
scholars who help in the purgation are limited to 
two or three blows each, since an infinity of blows 
is also to be avoided. The Rector may remit a 
portion of the penalty at the request of noble or 



THE JOCUND ADVENT 115 

honourable ladies who happen to be present, for 
it is useless to invite ladies if no remission is to be 
obtained. If the bajan is proud or troublesome, 
the pleas of the ladies whom he has invited will not 
avail ; he must have his three blows from each 
of his purgators, without any mercy. If a fresh- 
man failed to make his purgation within a month, 
it was to take place " in studio sub libro super 
anum " ; the choice between a book and a frying- 
pan as a weapon of castigation is characteristic of 
the solemn fooling of the jocund advent. The 
seizure of goods and of books, mentioned in some 
of the statutes we have quoted, is frequently for- 
bidden. At Orleans the statutes prohibit leading 
the bajan " ut ovis ad occisionem " to a tavern 
to be forced to spend his money, and denounce the 
custom as provocative of " ebrietates, turpiloquia, 
lascivias, pernoctationes " and other evils. They 
also forbid the practice of compelling him to cele- 
brate the jocund advent by seizing books, one or 
more, or by exacting anything from him. There are 
numerous other references in French statutes, some 
of which denounce the bejaunia as sufficiently ex- 
pensive to deter men from coming to the University, 
but details are disappointingly few. 

The initiation of the bajan attained its highest 
development in the German universities, where we 
find the French conception of the bajan, as afflicted 



116 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

with mortal sin and requiring purification, combined 
with the characteristic German conception of him as 
a wild animal who has to be tamed. His reforma- 
tion was accomplished by the use of planes, augers, 
saws, pincers and other instruments suitable for 
removing horns, tusks and claws from a dangerous 
animal, and the Deposition, or " modus deponendi 
cornua iis qui in numerum studiosorum co-optari 
volunt," became a recognised University ceremony. 
The statutes attempt to check it, e.g. at Vienna the 
bajan is not to be oppressed with undue exactions 
or otherwise molested or insulted, and at Leipsic 
the insults are not to take the form of blows, stones, 
or water. At Prague, " those who lay down (de- 
ponent) their rustic manners and ignorance are to 
be treated more mildly and moderately than in 
recent years (1544), and their lips or other parts of 
their bodies are not to be denied with filth or putrid 
and impure substances which produce sickness. 
But the Prague statute contemplates a Deposition 
ceremony in which the freshman is assumed to be 
a goat with horns to be removed. A black-letter 
handbook or manual for German students, consist- 
ing of dialogues or conversational Latin (much on the 
principle of tourists' conversational dictionaries), 
opens with a description of the preparations for a 
Deposition. The book, which has been reprinted 
in Zarncke's Die Deibtschen Universitaten im 



THE JOCUND ADVENT 117 

Mittelalter, is (from internal evidence) a picture of 
life at Heidelberg, but it is written in general 
terms. 

The new-comer seeks out a master that he may be 
entered on the roll of the University and be absolved 
from his bajan-ship. " Are your parents rich ? " 
is one of the master's first questions, and he is told 
that they are moderately prosperous mechanics 
who are prepared to do the best for their son. The 
master takes him to the Rector to be admitted, 
and then asks him, " Where do you intend to have 
your ' deposition ' as a bajan ? " The boy leaves 
all arrangements in the master's hands, reminding 
him of his poverty, and it is agreed to invite three 
masters, two bachelors, and some friends of the 
master to the ceremony. With a warning that he 
must not be afraid if strangers come and insult 
him, for it is all part of the tradition of a bajan's 
advent, the master goes to make arrangements for 
the feast. Two youths, Camillus and Bartoldus, 
then arrive, and pretend to be greatly disturbed 
by a foul smell, so strong that it almost drives them 
from the room. Camillus prepares to go, but 
Bartoldus insists upon an investigation of the cause. 
Camillus then sees a monster of terrible aspect, 
with huge horns and teeth, a nose curved like the 
beak of an owl, wild eyes and threatening lips. 
" Let us flee/' he says, " lest it attack us." Bartoldus 



118 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

then guesses that it is a bajan, a creature which 
Camillus has never seen, but of whose ferocity he 
has heard. The bold Bartoldus then addresses the 
bajan. " Domine Joannes/' he says, " whence do 
you come ? Certainly you are a compatriot of 
mine, give me your hand." Joannes stretches out 
his hand, but is met with the indignant question, 
" Do you come to attack me with your nails ? Why 
do you sit down, wild ass ? Do you not see that 
masters are present, venerable men, in whose pre- 
sence it becomes you to stand ? " Joannes stands, 
and is further insulted. His tormentors then affect 
to be sorry for him and make touching references 
to his mother's feelings (" Quid, si mater sciret, quae 
unice eum amat ? "), but relapse into abuse (O 
beane, asine, O foetide hirce, olens capra, 
bufo, cifra, O figura nihili, O tu omnino nihil). 
" What are we to do with him ? " says Camillus, 
and Bartoldus suggests the possibility of his reforma- 
tion and admission into their society. But they 
must have a doctor. Camillus is famous and 
learned in the science of medicine, and can remove 
his horns, file down his teeth, cure his blindness, and 
shave his long and horrible beard. While he goes 
for the necessary instruments, Bartoldus tells the 
victim to cheer up, for he is about to be cured from 
every evil of mind and body, and to be admitted 
to the privileges of the University. Camillus 



THE JOCUND ADVENT 119 

returns with ointment, and they proceed to some 
horseplay which Joannes resists (Compesce eius 
impetus et ut equum intractatum ipsum ilium 
constringe)." Tusks and teeth having been removed, 
the victim is supposed to be dying, and is made to 
confess to Bartoldus a list of crimes. His penance 
is to entertain his masters " largissima coena," not 
forgetting the doctor who has just healed him, and 
the confessor who has just heard his confession, for 
they also must be entertained " pingui refectione." 
But this confessor can only define the penance, he 
cannot give absolution, a right which belongs to the 
masters. Joannes is then taken to his master for the 
Deposition proper. Dr Rashdall describes the scene, 
from a rare sixteenth-century tract, which contains 
an illustration of a Deposition, and a defence of it 
by Luther, who justified his taking part in one of 
these ceremonies by giving it a moral and sym- 
bolical meaning. The bajan lies upon a table, under- 
going the planing of his tusks, " while a saw lies 
upon the ground, suggestive of the actual de-horning 
of the beast. The work itself and later apologies 
for the institution mention among the instruments 
of torture a comb and scissors for cutting the 
victim's hair, an auriscalpium for his ears, a knife 
for cutting his nails ; while the ceremony further 
appears to include the adornment of the youth's 
chin with a beard by means of burned cork or other 



120 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

pigment, and the administration, internal or ex- 
ternal, of salt and wine." 

In the English universities we have no trace of 
the " jocund advent " during the medieval period, 
but it is impossible to doubt that this kind of 
horseplay existed at Oxford and Cambridge. The 
statutes of New College refer to " that most vile and 
horrid sport of shaving beards " ; it was " wont to 
be practised on the night preceding the Inception 
of a Master of Arts," but the freshmen may have 
been the victims, as they were in similar ceremonies 
at the Feast of Fools in France. Antony a Wood, 
writing of his own undergraduate days in the middle 
of the seventeenth century, tells that charcoal fires 
were made in the Hall at Merton on Holy Days, 
from All Saints' Eve to Candlemas, and that 

" at all these fires every night, which began to be 
made a little after five of the clock, the senior 
undergraduates would bring into the hall the 
juniors or freshmen between that time and six 
of the clock, there make them sit downe on a 
forme in the middle of the hall, joyning to the 
declaiming desk ; which done, every one in order 
was to speake some pretty apothegme, or make 
a jest or bull, or speake some eloquent nonsense, 
to make the company laugh. But if any of the 
freshmen came off dull, or not cleverly, some of 
the forward or pragmatised seniors would " tuck " 
them, that is, set the nail of their thumb to their 



THE JOCUND ADVENT 121 

chin, just under the lower lipp, and by the help 
of their other fingers under the chin, they would 
give him a mark, which sometimes would produce 
blood." 

On Shrove Tuesday, 1648, Merton freshmen 
entertained the other undergraduates to a brass pot 
" full of cawdel." Wood, who was a freshman, 
describes how 

" every freshman according to seniority, was to 
pluck off his gowne and band and if possible to 
make himself look like a scoundrell. This done, 
they conducted each other to the high table, and 
there made to stand on a forme placed thereon ; 
from whence they were to' speak their speech with 
an audible voice to the company ; which if well 
done, the person that spoke it was to have a cup 
of cawdle and no salted drink ; if indifferently, 
some cawdle and some salted drink ; but if dull, 
nothing was given to him but salted drink or salt 
put in college beere, with tucks to boot. After- 
wards when they were to be admitted into the 
fraternity, the senior cook was to administer to 
them an oath over an old shoe, part of which runs 
thus : Item tu jurabis quod penniless bench (a 
seat at Carfax) non visit abis' &c. The rest is 
forgotten, and none there are now remembers it. 
After which spoken with gravity, the Freshman 
kist the shoe, put on his gown and band and took 
his place among the seniors." 



122 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

" This," says Wood, " was the way and custom 
that had been used in the college, time out of mind, 
to initiate the freshmen ; but between that time 
and the restoration of K. Ch. 2 it was disused, and 
now such a thing is absolutely forgotten/' His 
whole description, and especially the parody of the 
master's oath not to visit Stamford, goes to show 
that he was right in attributing the ceremonies to 
remote antiquity, and there are indications that 
the initiation of freshmen was practised elsewhere 
in Oxford. Hearne speaks of similar customs 
at Balliol and at Brasenose, and an eighteenth- 
century editor of Wood asserts that " striking 
traces " of the practice " may be found in many 
societies in this place, and in some a very near 
resemblance of it has been kept up till within these 
few years/'' Our quotation from Wood may there- 
fore serve to illustrate the treatment of the medieval 
freshman at Oxford. We possess no details of the 
jocund advent at Cambridge, but in the medieval 
Scottish universities, where the name of bajan 
still survives, there were relics of it within recent 
times. At St Andrews, a feast of raisins was the 
last survival of the bajan's " standing treat," and 
attacks made by " Semis " (second year men) upon 
a bajan class emerging from a lecture-room were an 
enlivening feature of student life at Aberdeen up 
to the end of the nineteenth century. The weapons 



THE JOCUND ADVENT 123 

in use were notebooks, and the belabouring of 
Aberdeen bajans with these instruments may be 
historically connected with the chastisement which 
we have found in some of the medieval initiation 
ceremonies. It would be fanciful to connect the 
gown- tearing, which was also a feature of these 
attacks, with the assaults upon the Rector's robe 
at Bologna. 



CHAPTER VII 

TOWN AND GOWN 

The violence which marked medieval life as a whole 
was not likely to be absent in towns where numbers 
of young clerks were members of a corporation at 
variance with the authorities of the city. Univer- 
sity records are full of injuries done to masters and 
students by the townsfolk, and of privileges and 
immunities obtained from Pope or King or Bishop 
at the expense of the burgesses. When a new 
University was founded, it was sometimes taken for 
granted that these conflicts must arise, and that 
the townsmen were certain to be in the wrong. 
Thus, when Duke Rudolf IV. founded the University 
of Vienna in 1365, he provided beforehand for 
such contingencies by ordaining that an attack on 
a student leading to the loss of a limb or other 
member of the body was to be punished by the 
removal of the same member from the body of the 
assailant, and that for a lesser injury the offender's 
hand was to be wounded (" debet manus pugione 
transfxgi "). The criminal might redeem his person 
by a fine of a hundred silver marks for a serious 
injury and of forty marks for slighter damages, the 

124 



TOWN AND GOWN 125 

victim to receive half of the fine. Assailants of 
students were not to have benefit of sanctuary. 
Oxford history abounds in town and gown riots, the 
most famous of which is the battle of St Scholas- 
tica's Day (10th February) 1354. The riot originated 
in a tavern quarrel ; some clerks disapproved of the 
wine at an inn near Carfax, and (in Antony Wood's 
words) " the vintner giving them stubborn and 
saucy language, they threw the wine and vessel 
at his head/' His friends urged the inn-keeper 
" not to put up with the abuse/' and rang the bell 
of St Martin's Church. A mob at once assembled, 
armed with bows and arrows and other weapons ; 
they attacked every scholar who passed, and even 
fired at the Chancellor when he attempted to allay 
the tumult. The justly indignant Chancellor re- 
torted by ringing St Mary's bell and a mob of 
students assembled, also armed (in spite of many 
statutes to the contrary). A battle royal raged till 
nightfall, at which time the fray ceased, no one 
scholar or townsman being killed or mortally 
wounded or maimed." If the matter had ended 
then, little would have been heard of the story, 
but next day the townsmen stationed eighty armed 
men in St Giles's Church, who sallied out upon 
" certain scholars walking after dinner in Beaumont 
killed one of them, and wounded others. A second 
battle followed, in which the citizens, aided by some 



126 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

countrymen, defeated the scholars, and ravaged their 
halls, slaying and wounding. Night interrupted 
their operations, but on the following day, " with 
hideous noises and clamours the}?- came and invaded 
the scholars' houses . . . and those that resisted 
them and stood upon their defence (particularly 
some chaplains) they killed or else in a grievous 
sort wounded. . . . The crowns of some chaplains, 
that is, all the skin so far as the tonsure went, these 
diabolical imps flayed off in scorn of their clergy/' 

The injured University was fully avenged. The 
King granted it jurisdiction over the city, and, 
especially, control of the market, and the Bishop 
of Lincoln placed the townsmen under an interdict 
which was removed only on condition that the 
Mayor and Bailiffs, for the time being, and " three- 
score of the chiefest Burghers, should personally 
appear " every St Scholastica's Day in St Mary's 
Church, to attend a mass for the souls of the slain. 
The tradition that they were to wear halters or 
silken cords has no authority, but they were each " to 
offer at the altar one penny, of which oblation forty 
pence should be distributed to forty poor scholars 
of the University." The custom, with some modi- 
fications, survived the Reformation, and it was not 
till the nineteenth century that the Mayor of 
Oxford ceased to have cause to regret the battle 
of St Scholastica's Day. 



TOWN AND GOWN 127 

The accounts of St Scholastica's Day and of most 
other riots which have come down to us are written 
from the standpoint of the scholars, but the records 
of the city of Oxford give less detailed but not less 
credible instances of assaults by members of the 
University. On the eve of St John Baptist's Day 
in 1306, for example, the tailors of Oxford were 
celebrating Midsummer " cum Cytharis Viellis et 
alhs diversis instruments." After midnight, they 
went out " de shoppis suis " and danced and sang 
in the streets. A clerk, irritated by the noise, 
attacked them with a drawn sword, wounded one 
of them, and was himself mortally wounded in the 
skirmish. Of twenty-nine coroners' inquests which 
have been preserved for the period 1297-1322, 
thirteen are murders committed by scholars. 
Attacks on townsmen were not mere undergraduate 
follies, but were countenanced and even led by 
officials of the University, e.g. on a March night in 
1526 one of the proctors " sate uppon a blocke in 
the streete afore the shoppe of one Robert Jermyns, 
a barber, havinge a pole axe in his hand, a black 
cloake on his backe, and a hatt on his head/' and 
organised a riot in which many townsmen were 
" striken downe and sore beaten/' Citizens' houses 
were attacked and " the saide Proctour and his 
company . . . called for fire," threatening to burn 
the houses, and insulting the inmates with oppro- 



128 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

brious names. When such an incident as this was 
possible, it was of little use for the University to 
issue regulations or even to punish less exalted 
sinners., and the town must have suffered much from 
the outrages of scholars and of the " chamber- 
dekens " or pretended scholars of the University, 
who were responsible for much of the mischief. 
At Paris things became so bad that the Parlement 
had to issue a series of police regulations to suppress 
the bands of scholars, or pretended scholars, who 
wandered about the streets at night, disguised and 
armed. They attacked passers-by, and if they were 
wounded in the affray, their medical friends, we are 
told, dressed their wounds, so that they eluded 
discovery in the morning. The history of every 
University town provides instances of street con- 
flicts — the records of Orleans and Toulouse abound 
in them — but we must be content with a tale from 
Leipsic. 

The pages of the " Acta Rectorum " at Leipsic 
are full of illustrations of the wilder side of student 
life, from which we extract the story of one un- 
happy year. The year 1545 opened very badly, 
says the " Rector's Chronicle/' with three homicides. 
On Holy Innocents' Day, a bachelor was murdered 
by a skinner in a street riot, and the murderer, 
though he was seen by some respectable citizens, 
was allowed to escape. A student who killed a 



TOWN AND GOWN 129 

man on the night of the Sunday after the Epiphany 
was punished by the University in accordance with 
its statutes (i.e. by imprisonment for life in the 
bishop's prison). The third murder was that of a 
young bachelor who was walking outside the city, 
when two sons of rustics in the neighbourhood fell 
on him and killed him. Their names were known, 
but the city authorities refused to take action, and 
the populace, believing that they would not be 
punished, pursued the members of the University 
with continued insults and threats. After an 
unusually serious attack cum bombardis, (in which, 
" by the divine clemency/' a young mechanic was 
wounded), the University, failing to obtain redress, 
appealed to Prince Maurice of Saxony, who pro- 
mised to protect the University. A conference 
between the University and the city authorities 
took place, and edicts against carrying arms were 
published, but the skinners immediately indulged in 
another outrage. One of them, Hans von Buntzell. 
on Whitsunday, attacked, with a drawn sword, the 
son of a doctor of medicine, " a youth (as all agree) 
most guiltless/' and wounded him in the arm, 
and if another student had not unexpectedly 
appeared, " would without doubt have killed this 
excellent boy." The criminal was pursued to the 
house of a skinner called Meysen, where he took 
refuge. The city authorities, inspired by the 



130 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

Prince's intervention, offered to impose three 
alternative sentences, and the University was asked 
to say whether Hans von Buntzell should lose one 
of his hands, or be publicly whipped and banished 
for ten years, or should have a certain stigma 
(" quod esset manus amittendae signum ") burned 
in his hand and be banished. The University re- 
plied that it was for the city to carry out the com- 
mands of the Prince, and declined to select the 
penalty. On the following Monday a scaffold was 
erected in the market-place, on which were placed 
rods and a knife for cutting off the hand, " which 
apparatus was thought by the skinners to be much 
too fierce and cruel, and a concourse began from 
all parts, composed not of skinners alone, but of 
mechanics of every kind, interceding with the 
Council for the criminal/' The pleadings of the 
multitude gained the day, and all the preparations 
were removed from the market-place amid the 
murmurs of the students. After supper, three senior 
members of the skinners came to the Rector, begging 
for a commutation of the punishment, and offering 
to beat Hans themselves in presence of representa- 
tives of the University and the Town Council, with 
greater ferocity than the public executioner could 
do if he were to whip him three times in public. 
The Rector replied that he must consult the 
University, and the proposal was thrown out in 



TOWN AND GOWN 131 

Congregation. On the Saturday after the Feast of 
Trinity, the stigma was burned on the criminal's 
hand, and as a necessary consequence he was 
banished. 

Town riots do not complete the tale of violence. 
There were struggles with Jews, and a Jewish row 
at Oxford in 1268 resulted in the erection of a cross 
with the following inscription : — 

Quis meus auctor erat ? Judaei. Quomodo ? Sumptu 
Quis jussit ? Regnans. Quo procurante ? Magistri. 
Cur ? Cruce pro fracta ligni. Quo tempore ? Festo 
Ascensus Domini. Quis est locus ? Hie ubi sisto. 

Clerks' enemies were not always beyond their own 
household. The history of Paris, the earlier history 
of Oxford, and the record of many another Univer- 
sity give us instances of mortal combats between 
the Nations. The scholars of Paris, in the thirteenth 
and fourteenth centuries, had to face the mortal 
enmity of the monks of the Abbey of St Germain, 
the meadow in front of which was claimed by the 
Faculty of Arts. The sight of Paris students walking 
or playing on the Pre-aux-clercs had much the same 
effect upon the Abbot and monks as the famous 
donkeys had upon the strong-minded aunt of 
David Copperfield, but the measures they took 
for suppressing the nuisance were less exactly 
proportioned to the offence. One summer day in 
1278, masters and scholars went for recreation to 



132 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

the meadow, when the Abbot sent out armed 
servants and retainers of the monastery to attack 
them. They came shouting " Ad mortem cleri- 
corum," death to the clerks, " verbis crudelibus, 
ad mortem ad mortem, inhumaniter pluries repetitis." 
A " famous Bachelor of Arts " and other clerks were 
seriously wounded and thrown into horrible dun- 
geons ; another victim lost an eye. The retreat into 
the city was cut off, and fugitives were pursued far 
into the country. Blood flowed freely, and the 
scholars who escaped returned to their halls with 
broken heads and limbs and their clothes torn to 
fragments. Some of the victims died of their 
wounds, and the monks were punished by King and 
Pope, the Abbot being pensioned off and the Abbey 
compelled to endow two chaplains to say masses 
for scholars. Forty years later the University 
had again to appeal to the Pope to avenge assaults 
by retainers of the Abbey upon scholars who were 
fishing in the moat outside the Abbey walls. The 
monks, of course, may have given a different version 
of the incidents. 



CHAPTER VIII 

SUBJECTS OF STUDY, LECTURES AND 
EXAMINATIONS 

The student of a medieval University was, as we 
have seen, expected to converse in Latin, and all 
instruction was given in that language. It was 
therefore essential that, before entering on the 
University curriculum, he should have a competent 
knowledge of Latin. College founders attempted 
to secure this in various ways, sometimes by an 
examination {e.g. at the College of Cornouaille, at 
Paris, no one was admitted a bursar until he was 
examined and found to be able to read), and some- 
times by making provision for young boys to be 
taught by a master of grammar. The Founder of 
New College met the difficulty by the foundation of 
Winchester College, at which all Wykehamists 
(except the earliest members of New College) were 
to be thoroughly grounded in Latin. It was more 
difficult for a University to insist upon such a test, 
but, in 1328, the University of Paris had ordered 
that before a youth was admitted to the privileges 
of " scholarity " or studentship, he must appear 
before the Rector and make his own application in 

133 



134 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

continuous Latin, without any French words. 
Formulae for this purpose would, doubtless, soon 
be invented and handed down by tradition, and the 
precaution cannot have been of much practical 
value. There were plenty of grammar schools 
in the Middle Ages, and a clever boy was likely to 
find a patron and a place of education in the neigh- 
bourhood of his home. The grammar schools in 
University towns had therefore originally no special 
importance, but many of the undergraduates who 
came up at thirteen or fourteen required some 
training such as William of Waynflete provided for 
his younger demies in connexion with the Grammar 
School which he attached to Magdalen, or such as 
Walter de Merton considered desirable when he 
ordained that there should be a Master of Grammar 
in his College to teach the poor boys, and that their 
seniors were to go to him in any difficulty without 
any false shame (" absque rubore "). Many univer- 
sities extended certain privileges to boys studying 
grammar, by placing their names on matriculation 
rolls, though such matriculation was not part of the 
curriculum for a degree. Masters in Grammar were 
frequently, but not necessarily, University gradu- 
ates ; at Paris there were grammar mistresses as 
well as grammar masters. The connexion between 
the grammar schools and the University was ex- 
ceptionally close at Oxford and Cambridge, where 



SUBJECTS OF STUDY 135 

degrees in grammar came to, be given. The Univer- 
sity of Oxford early legislated for " inceptors " who 
were taking degrees in grammar, and ordered the 
grammar masters who were graduates to enrol, pro 
forma, the names of pupils of non-graduates, and to 
compel non-graduate masters to obey the regulations 
of the University. A meeting of the grammar 
masters twice a term for discussions about their 
subject and the method of teaching it was also 
ordered by the University, which ultimately suc- 
ceeded in wresting the right of licensing grammar 
masters from the Archdeacon or other official to 
whom it naturally belonged. A fourteenth-century 
code of statutes for the Oxford grammar schools 
orders the appointment of two Masters of Arts to 
superintend them, and gives some minute instruc- 
tions about the teaching. Grammar masters are 
to set verses and compositions, to be brought next 
day for correction ; and they are to be specially 
careful to see that the younger boys can recognise 
the different parts of speech and parse them accur- 
ately. In choosing books to read with their pupils, 
they are to' avoid the books of Ovid " de Arte 
Amandi " and similar works. Boys are to be taught 
to construe in French as well as in English, lest they 
be ignorant of the French tongue. The study of 
French was not confined to the grammar boys : the 
University recognised the wisdom of learning a 



136 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

language necessary for composing charters, holding 
lay-courts, and pleading in the English fashion, and 
lectures in French were permitted at any hour 
that did not interfere with the regular teaching of 
Arts subjects. Such lectures were under the con- 
trol of the superintendents of the grammar masters. 
The degrees which Oxford and Cambridge con- 
ferred in Grammar did not involve residence or 
entitle the recipients to a vote in Convocation ; 
but the conferment was accompanied by ceremonies 
which were almost parodies of the solemn proceed- 
ings of graduation or inception in a recognised 
Faculty, a birch taking the place of a book as a 
symbol of the power and authority entrusted to the 
graduand. A sixteenth-century Esquire Bedel of 
Cambridge left, for the benefit of his successors, 
details of the form for the " enteryng of a Master 
in Gramer." The " Father " of the Faculty of 
Grammar (at Cambridge the mysterious individual 
known as the " Master of Glomery ") brought his 
" sons " to St Mary's Church for eight o'clock mass. 
" When mass is done, fyrst shall begynne the acte 
in Gramer. The Father shall have hys sete made 
before the Stage for Physyke (one of the platforms 
erected in the church for doctors of the different 
faculties, etc.) and shall sytte alofte under the stage 
for Physyke. The Proctour shall say, Incipiatis. 
When the Father hath argyude as shall plese the 



SUBJECTS OF STUDY 137 

Proctour, the Bedeyll in Arte shall bring the Master 
of Gramer to the Vyce-chancelar, delyveryng hym 
a Palmer wyth a Rodde, whych the Vyce-chancelar 
shall gyve to the seyde Master in Gramer, and so 
create hym Master. Then shall the Bedell purvay 
for every master in Gramer a shrewde Boy, whom 
the master in Gramer shall bete openlye in the 
Scolys, and the master in Gramer shall give the 
Boy a Grote for Hys Labour, and another Grote 
to hym that provydeth the Rode and the Palmer 
&c. de singulis. And thus endythe the Acte in 
that Facultye/' We know of the existence of 
similar ceremonies at Oxford. " Had the ambition 
to take these degrees in Grammar been widely 
diffused," says Dr Rashdall, " the demand for 
whipping boys might have pressed rather hardly 
upon the youth of Oxford ; but very few of them 
are mentioned in the University Register/' 

The basis of the medieval curriculum in Arts is to 
be found in the Seven Liberal Arts of the Dark Ages, 
divided into the Trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric and 
Dialectic) and the Quadrivium (Music, Arithmetic, 
Geometry and Astronomy). The Quadrivium was 
of comparatively little importance ; Geometry and 
Music received small attention ; and Arithmetic, 
and Astronomy were at first chiefly useful for 
finding the date of Easter ; but the introduction of 
mathematical learning from Arabian sources in 



138 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

the thirteenth century greatly increased the scope 
of Geometry and Arithmetic, and added the study 
of Algebra. 

The Grammar taught in the universities assumed 
a knowledge of such a text-book as that of Alexander 
de Villa Dei, and consisted of an analysis of the 
systems of popular grammarians, based on the 
section De barbarismo in the Ars Grammatica of 
JElius Donatus, a fourth-century grammarian, whose 
work became universally used throughout Europe. 
Latin poets were read in the grammar schools, 
and served for grammatical and philological ex- 
positions in the universities, and the study of 
Rhetoric depended largely on the treatises of 
Cicero. The " Dialectic " of the Trivium was the 
real interest of the medieval student among the 
ancient seven subjects, but the curriculum in Arts 
came to include also the three Philosophies, Physical, 
Moral, and Metaphysical. The arms of the Univer- 
sity of Oxford consist of a book with seven clasps 
surrounded by three crowns, the clasps representing 
the seven Liberal Arts and the crowns the three 
Philosophies. The universities were schools of 
philosophy, mental and physical, and the attention 
of students in Arts was chiefly directed to the logic, 
.metaphysics, physics, and ethics of Aristotle. Up 
to the twelfth century, Aristotle was known only 
through the translations into Latin of the sections 



SUBJECTS OF STUDY 139 

of the Org anon, entitled De Interpretatione and 
Categoriae, and through the logical works of 
Boethius. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 
the range of medieval studies was greatly enlarged 
by the introduction of other works of Aristotle from 
translations partly from the Arabic and partly 
direct from the Greek. The conservatism of the 
University of Paris at first forbade the study of 
the new Aristotle, but it soon became universal 
in the medieval universities. In addition to the 
works of Aristotle, as they were known in the 
Middle Ages, medieval students read such books 
as Porphyry's Isagcge, or Introduction to Aristotle ; 
the criticism of Aristotle's Categories, by Gilbert de la 
Porree, known as the Sex Principia ; the Sunimulae 
Logicales, a semi-grammatical, semi-logical treatise 
by Petrus Hispanus (Pope John XXI.) ; the Parva 
Logicalia of Marsilius of Inghen ; the Labyrinihus 
and Grecismus of Eberhard ; the Scriptural com- 
mentaries of Nicolaus de Lyra ; the Tractates de 
Sphaera, an astronomical work by a thirteenth- 
century Scotsman, John Holywood (Joannes de 
Sacro Bosco) ; and they also studied Priscian, 
Donatus, Boethius, Euclid, and Ptolemy.- In 1431 
the Nova Rhetorica of Cicero, the Metamorphoses 
of Ovid, and the works of Virgil were prescribed at 
Oxford as alternatives to the fourth book of the 
Topica of Boethius. By the end of the century 



140 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

Humanism had found a place in the universities, 
and sixteenth - century colleges at Oxford and 
Cambridge provided for the study of the literatures 
of Greece and Rome. In Scotland the medieval 
teaching of Aristotle reigned supreme in all its three 
universities until the appointment of Andrew 
Melville as Principal at Glasgow in 1574, and in 
1580 he had some difficulty in persuading the 
masters at St Andrews to " peruse Aristotle in his 
ain language/' 

Lectures were either " ordinary " or " cursory/' 
a distinction which, as Dr Rashdall has shown, 
corresponded to the " ordinary " and " extra- 
ordinary " lectures at Bologna. The ordinary 
lectures were the statutable exercises appointed by 
the Faculty, and delivered by its properly accredited 
teachers in the hours of the morning, which were 
sacred to the prelections of the masters. Cursory 
lectures were delivered in the afternoon, frequently 
by bachelors ; but as College teaching became 
more important than the lectures given in the 
Schools, the distinction gradually disappeared. 
Ordinary lectures were delivered " solemniter " and 
involved a slow and methodical analysis of the book. 
The statutes of Vienna prescribe that no master 
shall read more than one chapter of the text 
" ante quaes tionem vel etiam quaes tione expedita." 
Various references in College and University statutes 



SUBJECTS OF STUDY 141 

show that the cursory lecture was not regarded as 
the full equivalent of an ordinary lecture. At 
Oxford, attendance on a lecture on the books or any 
book of the Metaphysics, or on the Physics, or the 
Ethics, was not to count for a degree, except in the 
case of a book largely dealing with the opinions 
of the ancients. The third and fourth books of the 
Metaphysics were excepted from the rule, " they 
being usually read cursorily, that the ordinary 
reading of the other books might proceed more 
rapidly/' The cursory lecture was clearly beloved 
of the pupil, for Oxford grammar masters are 
reproved for lecturing " cursorie " instead of 
" ordinarie " for the sake of gain ; and at Vienna, 
the tariff for cursory lectures is double that for 
ordinary lectures. At Paris the books of Aristotle 
de Dialectica were to be read " ordinarie et non ad 
cursum," and students of medicine had to read 
certain books " semel ordinarie, bis cursorie." The 
statutes of Heidelberg contrast " cursorie " with 
" extense." In the Faculty of Canon Law there 
was an additional distinction, the ordinary lecture 
being generally restricted to the Decretum ; at 
Oxford, the book of Decretals is to be read at the 
morning hours at which the doctors of law are wont 
to deliver ordinary lectures, and at Vienna the 
doctors are forbidden to read anything but the 
Decretals in the morning at ordinary lectures. 



142 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

The instructions given to the Vienna doctors of 
law illustrate the thoroughness of the medieval 
lecture in all faculties. They are first to state the 
case carefully, then to read the text, then to re- 
state the case, then to remark on " notabilia," and 
then to discuss questions arising out of the subject, 
and finally, to deal with the Glosses. So, at Oxford, 
the Masters in Arts are to read the books on logic 
and the philosophies " rite," with the necessary 
and adequate exposition of the text, and with 
questions and arguments pertinent to the subject- 
matter. 

A problem, still unsolved, about the methods of 
lecturing disturbed the minds of the Parisian 
masters. Were they to dictate lectures or to speak 
so fast that their pupils could not commit their 
words to writing ? From the standpoint of teachers 
who delivered frequent lectures, all of the same type, 
and on a few set books, it was probably desirable 
that there should not be opportunities of possessing 
such copies of a professor's lectures as used to circu- 
late, not many years ago, in Scottish and in German 
universities. In 1229 the Faculty of Arts at Paris 
made a statute on the methods of lecturing. It 
explains that there are two ways of reading books 
in the liberal arts. The masters of philosophy may 
deliver their expositions from their chairs so rapidly 
that, although the minds of their audience may 



SUBJECTS OF STUDY 143 

grasp their meaning, their hands cannot write it 
down. This, they say, was the custom in other 
faculties. The other way is to speak so slowly 
that their hearers can take down what they say. 
On mature reflection, the Faculty has decided that 
the former is the better way, and henceforth in any 
lecture, ordinary or cursory, or in any disputation 
or other manner of teaching, the master is to speak 
as in delivering a speech, and as if no one were 
writing in his presence. A lecturer who breaks 
the new rule is to be suspended for a year, and if 
the students showed their dislike to it, by shouting, 
hissing, groaning, or throwing stones, they were to 
be sent down for a year. More than two hundred 
years later, in 1452, the statute was rescinded by 
Cardinal Estoutville, but it was probably never 
operative. Estoutville permitted either method of 
lecturing, and contented himself with forbidding 
lecturers to use questions and lectures which were 
not of their own composition, or to deliver their 
lectures (however good) to be read by one of their 
scholars as a deputy. He instructs the masters to 
lecture regularly according to the statutes and to ex- 
plain the text of Aristotle, " depuncto in punctum/' 
and, holding that fear and reverence are the life- 
blood of scholastic discipline, he repeats an in- 
junction which we find in 1336, that the students 
in Arts are to sit not on benches or raised seats, but 



144 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

on the floor, " ut occasio superbiae a juvenibus 
secludatur." The name of the street in which 
lectures were given, Vicus Stramineus, is said to 
have been derived from the straw on which the 
students sat. The question whether lectures should 
be committed to writing or not, troubled the masters 
of other universities besides Paris, and the statutes 
of the College de Verdale at Toulouse accept, in 
1337, the view taken at Paris a hundred years 
earlier. Since study is a vehement application of 
the mind, and requires the whole man, the scholars 
are forbidden to fatigue themselves with too many 
lectures — not more than two or three a day — and 
in lecture they are not to take down the lecturer's 
words, nor, trusting in writings of this kind, to blunt 
their " proprium intellectum." In the Schools, they 
must not use " incausta " or pencils except for 
correcting a book, etc. And what they have been 
able to retain in their memory they must meditate 
on without delay. 

The insistence on meditation was a useful educa- 
tional method, but as teaching became more 
organised, the student was not left without guidance 
in his meditations. The help which he received 
outside lectures was given in Repetitions or Resump- 
tions. The procedure at Repetitions may be illus- 
trated from the statutes of the College of Dainville 
at Paris : " We ordain that all bursars in grammar 



SUBJECTS OF STUDY 145 

and philosophy speak the Latin tongue, and that 
those who hear the same book ordinarily and cur- 
sorily shall attend one and the same master (namely, 
one whom the master [of the College] assigns to 
them), and after the lecture they shall return home 
and meet in one place to repeat the lecture. One 
after another shall repeat the whole lecture, so that 
each of them may know it well, and the less advanced 
shall be bound daily to repeat the lectures to the 
more proficient/' A later code of the same College 
provides that " All who study humane letters shall, 
on every day of the schools read in the morning a 
composition, that is a speech in Latin, Greek or the 
vernacular, to their master, being prepared to 
expound the writer or historian who is being read 
in daily lecture in their schools. At the end of 
the week, that is on Friday or Saturday, they shall 
show up to their master a resume of all the lectures 
they have learned that week, and every day before 
they go to the schools they shall be bound to make 
repetitions to one of the philosophers or of the 
theologians whom the [College] master shall choose 
for this work/' At Lou vain, the time between 
5 a.m. and the first lecture (about seven) was spent 
in studying the lesson that the students might 
better understand the lecture ; after hearing it, 
they returned to their own rooms to revise it and 
commit it to memory. After dinner, their books 

K 



146 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

were placed on a table, and all the scholars of one 
Faculty repeated their lesson and answered questions. 
A similar performance took place in the two hours 
before supper. After supper, the tutor treated 
them for half an hour to a "jocum honestum," 
and before sending them to bed gave them a light 
and pleasant disputation. The disputation was a 
preparation for the disputations which formed part 
of what we should now term the degree examina- 
tions. A thesis was propounded, attacked, and 
defended (" impugned and propugned ") with the 
proper forms of syllogistic reasoning. 

The teaching, both in lectures and in disputations, 
was originally University teaching, and the younger 
Masters of Arts, the " necessary regents," were 
bound to stay up for some years and lecture in the 
Schools. They were paid by their scholars, and the 
original meaning of the word " Collections," still 
in frequent use at Oxford, is traditionally supposed 
to be found in the payments made for lectures at 
the end of each term. Thus, at Oxford, a student 
paid threepence a term (one shilling a year) to his 
regent for lectures in Logic, and fourpence a term 
for lectures in Natural Philosophy. The system 
was not a satisfactory one, and alike in Paris, in 
Oxford, and in Cambridge, it succumbed to the 
growth of College teaching. The Head of a Parisian 
College, from the first, superintended the studies 



SUBJECTS OF STUDY 147 

of the scholars, and, although this duty was not 
required of an Oxford or Cambridge Head, provision 
was gradually made in the statutes of English 
colleges for the instruction of the junior members 
by their seniors. The first important step in this 
direction was taken by William of Wykeham, who 
ordered special payment to be made by the College 
to Fellows who undertook the tuition of the younger 
Fellows. His example was followed in this, as in 
other matters, by subsequent founders both at 
Oxford and at Cambridge, and gradually University 
teaching was, in the Faculty of Arts, almost entirely 
superseded by College tuition. In other universities, 
lectures continued to be given by University officials. 
The medieval undergraduates had a tendency to 
" rag " in lectures, a tradition which is almost un- 
known at Oxford and Cambridge, but which per- 
sisted till quite recent times in the Scottish univer- 
sities. Prohibitions of noise and disturbance in 
lecture-rooms abound in all statutes. At Vienna, 
students in Arts are exhorted to behave like young 
ladies (more virginum) and to refrain from laughter, 
murmurs, and hisses, and from tearing down the 
schedules in which the masters give notice of their 
lectures. At Prague, also, the conduc of young 
ladies was held up as a model for the student at 
lecture, and, at Angers, students who hissed in 
contempt of a doctor were to be expelled. 



148 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

The career of a student was divided into two parts 
by his " Determination/' a ceremony which is the 
origin of the Bachelor's degree. At Paris, where, at 
all events in the earlier period of its history, examina- 
tions were real, the " Determination " was preceded 
by " Responsions," and no candidate was admitted 
to determine until he had satisfied a Regent Master 
in the Schools, in public, " de Questione respondens." 
The determination itself was a public disputation, 
after which the determiner might wear the bachelor's 
" cappa " and lecture on the Organon. He continued 
his attendance on the lectures in the Schools up to 
the time of his " Inception " as a master. The In- 
ception was preceded by an examination for licence 
and by a disputation known as the Quodlibetica, 
at which the subject was chosen by the candidate. 
The bachelor who was successful in obtaining the 
Chancellor's licence proceeded to the ceremony of 
Inception, and received his master's biretta. 

The stringency of examinations varied in different 
universities and at different times. The propor- 
tion of successful candidates seems to have been 
everywhere very large, and in some universities 
rejection must have been almost unknown. We 
do find references to disappointed candidates, e.g. 
at Caen, where medical students who have been 
" ploughed " have to take an oath not to bring 
" malum vel damnum " upon the examiners. But 



SUBJECTS OF STUDY 149 

even at Lou vain, where the examination system 
was fully developed in the Middle Ages, and where 
there were class lists in the fifteenth century (the 
classes being distinguished as Rigorosi, Transibiles, 
and Gratiosi), failure was regarded as an exceptional 
event ("si auteni, quod absit, aliqui inveniantur 
simpliciter gratiosi seu refutabiles, erunt de quarto 
ordine "). The regulations for examinations at 
Louvain prescribe that the examiners are not to ask 
disturbing questions (" animo turbandi aut confun- 
dendi promo vendos ") and forbid unfair treatment 
of pupils of particular masters and frivolous or 
useless questions ; although at his Quodlibeticum, 
the bachelor might indulge in " jocosas questiones 
ad auditorii recreationem." The element of dis- 
play implied in the last quotation was never absent 
from medieval examinations, and at Oxford, there 
seems to have been little besides this ceremonial 
element. A candidate had to prove that he had 
complied with the regulations about attendance at 
lectures, etc., and to obtain evidence of fitness 
from a number of masters. A bachelor had to 
dispute several times with a master, and these 
disputations, which were held at the Augustinian 
Convent, came to be known as " doing Austins/' 
The medieval system, as it lingered at Oxford in 
the close of the eighteenth century, is thus described 
by Vicesimus Knox : — 



150 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

" The youth whose heart pants for the honour 
of a Bachelor of Arts degree must wait patiently 
till near four years have revolved. . . . He is 
obliged during this period, once to oppose and 
once to respond. . . . This opposing and re- 
sponding is termed, in the cant of the place, doing 
generals. Two boys or men, as they call them- 
selves, agree to do generals together. The first 
step in this mighty work is to procure arguments. 
These are always handed down, from generation 
to generation, on long slips of paper, and consist 
of foolish syllogisms on foolish subjects, of the 
foundation or significance of which the respondent 
and opponent seldom know more than an infant 
in swaddling cloaths. The next step is to go for 
a liceat to one of the petty officers, called the 
Regent-Master of the Schools, who subscribes his 
name to the questions and receives sixpence as 
his fee. When the important day arrives, the 
two doughty disputants go into a large dusty 
room, full of dirt and cobwebs. . . . Here they 
sit in mean desks, opposite to each other from 
one o'clock till three. Not once in a hundred 
times does any officer enter ; and, if he does, he 
hears a syllogism or two, and then makes a bow, 
and departs, as he came and remained, in solemn 
silence. The disputants then return to the 
amusement of cutting the desks, carving their 
names, or reading Sterne's Sentimental Journey, 
or some other edifying novel. When the exercise 
is duly performed by both parties, they have a 
right to the title and insignia of Sophs : but not 



SUBJECTS OF STUDY 151 

before they have been formally created by one 
of the regent-masters, before whom they kneel, 
while he lays a volume of Aristotle's works on 
their heads, and puts on a hood, a piece of black 
crape, hanging from their necks, and down to 
their heels. . . . There remain only one or two 
trifling forms, and another disputation almost 
exactly similar to doing generals, but called 
answering under bachelor previous to the awful 
examination. Every candidate is obliged to be 
examined in the whole circle of the sciences by 
three masters of arts of his own choice. . . . 
Schemes, as they are called, or little books con- 
taining forty or fifty questions on each science, 
are handed down from age to age, from one to 
another. The candidate employs three or four 
days in learning these by heart, and the examiners, 
having done the same before him, know what 
questions to ask, and so all goes on smoothly. 
When the candidate has displayed his universal 
knowledge of the sciences, he is to display his 
skill in philology. One of the masters there- 
fore asks him to construe a passage in some Greek 
or Latin classic, which he does with no interrup- 
tion, just as he pleases, and as well as he can. 
The statutes next require that he should translate 
familiar English phrases into Latin. And now 
is the time when the masters show their wit and 
jocularity. . . . This familiarity, however, 
only takes place when the examiners are pot- 
companions of the candidate, which indeed is 
usually the case ; for it is reckoned good manage- 



152 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

ment to get acquainted with two or three jolly 
young masters of arts, and supply them well with 
port previously to the examination. If the vice- 
chancellor and proctors happen to enter the 
school, a very uncommon event, then a little 
solemnity is put on. . . .As neither the officer, 
nor anyone else, usually enters the room (for it is 
reckoned very ungenteel), the examiners and the 
candidates often converse on the last drinking- 
bout, or on horses, or read the newspapers or a 
novel/' 



The supply of port was the eighteenth-century 
relic of the feasts which used to accompany 
Determination and Inception, and with which so 
many sumptuary regulations of colleges and univer- 
sities are concerned. There is a reference to a 
Determining Feast in the Paston Letters, in which 
the ill-fated Walter Paston, writing in the summer 
of 1479, a few weeks before his premature death, 
says to his brother : " And yf ye wyl know what 
day I was mead Baschyler, I was maad on Fryday 
was sevynyth, and I mad my fest on the Munday 
after. I was promysyd venyson ageyn my fest of 
my Lady Harcort, and of a noder man to, but I 
was desevyd of both ; but my gestes hewld them 
plesyd with such mete as they had, blyssyd be God. 
Hoo have yeo in Hys keeping. Wretyn at Oxon, 
on the Wedenys day next after Seynt Peter." 



SUBJECTS OF STUDY 153 

A few glimpses of the life of this fifteenth-century 
Oxonian may conclude our survey. Walter Paston 
had been sent to Oxford in 1473, under the charge 
of a priest called James Gloys. His mother did not 
wish him to associate too closely with the son of 
their neighbour, Thomas Holler. " I wold/' she 
says, " Walter schuld be copilet with a better than 
Holler son is . . . howe be it I wold not that he 
schuld make never the lesse of hym, by cause he is 
his contre man and neghbour." The boy was 
instructed to " doo welle, lerne Avell, and be of good 
rewle and disposycion," and Gloys was asked to 
" bydde hym that he be not to hasty of takyng of 
orderes that schuld bynd him." To take Orders 
under twenty- three years of age might lead, in 
Margaret Pas ton's opinion, to repentance at leisure, 
and " I will love hym better to be a good secular 
man than to be a lewit priest." We next hear of 
Walter in May 1478 when he writes to his mother 
recommending himself to her " good moderchypp," 
and asking for money. He has received £5, 16s. 6d., 
and his expenses amount to £6, 5s. 5d. " That comth 
over the reseytys in my exspenses I have borrowed 
of Master Edmund and yt draweth to 8 shillings." 
He might have applied for a loan to one of the 
" chests " which benevolent donors had founded 
for such emergencies, depositing some article of 
value, and receiving a temporary loan : but he pre- 



154 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

ferred to borrow from his new tutor, Edmund Alyard. 
By March 1479, Alyard was able to reassure the 
anxious mother about her boy's choice of a career ; 
he was to go to law, taking his Bachelor's degree in 
Arts at Midsummer. His brother, Sir John, who 
was staying at the George at Paul's Wharf in London, 
intended to be present at the ceremony, but his 
letter miscarried : " Martin Brown had that same 
tyme mysch mony in a bage, so that he durst not 
bryng yt with hym, and that same letter was in that 
same bage, and he had forge te to take owt the 
letter, and he sent all togeder by London, so that 
yt was the next day after that I was maad Bachyler 
or than the letter cam, and so the fawt was not in 
me." This is the last we hear of Walter Paston. 
On his way home, on the 18th August 1479, he died 
at Norwich, after a short illness. He left a number 
of " togae " to his Oxford friends, including Robert 
Holler, the son of his Norfolk neighbour, to whom 
he also bequeathed " unum pulvinar vocatum le 
holstar." The rest of his Oxford goods he left to 
Alyard, but his sheep and his lands to his own 
family. The cost of his illness and funeral amounted 
to about thirty shillings. No books are mentioned 
in the will ; possibly they were sold for his inception 
feast, or he may never have possessed any. As a 
junior student, he would not have been allowed 
to use the great library which Humphrey of Glou- 



SUBJECTS OF STUDY 155 

cester had presented to the University ; but there 
were smaller libraries to which he might have 
access, for books were sometimes chained up 
in St Mary's Church that scholars might read 
them. 



APPENDIX 

My attention has been called (too late for a reference in 
the text) to a medieval Latin poem giving a gloomy 
account of student life in Paris in the twelfth century. 
The verses, which have been printed in the American Journal 
of Philology (vol. xi. p. 80), insist upon the hardships of the 
student's life, and contrast his miserable condition with 
the happier lot of the citizens of Paris. For him there is 
no rejoicing in the days of his youth, and no hope even of 
a competence in the future. His lodgings are wretched 
and neglected ; his dress is miserable, and his appearance 
slovenly. His food consists of peas, beans, and cabbage, 
and 

" libido 

Mensse nulla venit nisi quod sale sparsa rigorem 

Esca parum flectit." 

His bed is a hard mattress stretched on the floor, and 
sleep brings him only a meagre respite from the toils of 
the day : — 

" Sed in ilia pace soporis 
Pacis eget studii labor insopitus, et ipso 
Cura vigil somno, libros operamque ministrat 
Excitse somnus animse, nee prima sopori 
Anxietas cedit, sed quae vigilaverat ante 
Sollicitudo redit, et major summa laboris 
Curarum studiis in somnibus obicit Hydram." 

157 



158 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

In the early hours of the morning he goes to his lectures, 
and the whole of his day is given to study. The descrip- 
tion of the student at lecture is interesting : — 

" Aure et mente bibit et verba cadentia promo 
Promptus utroque levat, oculique et mentis in illo 
Fixa vigilque manet acies aurisque maritat 
Pronuba dilectam cupida cum mente Minervam." 



SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Savigny : Geschichte der romischen Rechts im Mittelalter. 

(Heidelberg, 1834.) 
Sir William Hamilton .- Discussions on Philosophy and Litera- 
ture, Education, and University Reform.-" (London, 1852.) 
Denifle : Die Entstehung der Universitaten des Mittelalters bis 

^ 1400. (Berlin, 1885.) 

"Rashdall : The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. 

(Oxford, 1895.) 
Kaufmann : Geschichte der Deutschen Universitaten. (Stutt- 
gart, 1888.) 

Article on Universities in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

,A.rchiv fur Lit. u. Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters. Jurist 
Statutes of Padua (1331) in vol. vi. ; Salamanca documents 
in vol. v. 

Malagola : Statuti della universita e dei collegi dello studio 
bolognese. (Bologna, 1888.) 

Denifle and Chatelain : Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis. 
(Paris, 1889-1897.) 
(Many of the statutes of the Colleges of Paris will be found 

scattered through Felibien : Histoire de la Ville de Paris. Paris, 

1725.) 

Antony Wood : History and Antiquities of the University of 
Oxford. (Ed. Gutch. Oxford, 1792-6.) 

History and Antiquities of the Colleges and Halls in the 

University of Oxford. (Ed. Gutch. Oxford, 1786.) 

Anstey : Munimenta Academica. (Rolls Series, 1868.) 

Statutes of the Colleges of Oxford. (London, 1853.) 

Clark : The Colleges of Oxford. (London, 1892.) 

(The best account of Oxford will be found in vol. ii., Part ii., 

of Dr Rashdall's " Universities of Europe." There are two short 

169 



160 LIFE IN THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY 

histories of the University by Maxwell Lyte (London, 1886) and 

JB rod rick (London, 1886.).) 

Documents relating to the University and Colleges of Cambridge. 

(London, 1852.) 
Mullinger : The University of Cambridge from the Earliest Times 

to the Royal Injunctions of 1535. (Cambridge, 1873.) 
In two subsequent volumes Mr Mullinger has continued the 
narrative to the latter half of the seventeenth century, and he has 
also written a short " History of the University of Cambridge." 
(Epochs of Church History. London, 1888.) 
Gherardi : Statuti della university e studio Florentine 

(Florence, 1881.) 
Villanueva : Statutes of the University of Lerida in "Viage 

Literario a las Iglesias de Espana." T. xvi. (Madrid, 1851.) 
Marcel Fournier : Les Statuts et Privileges des Universites 

francaises clepuis leur fondation jusqu'en 1789. (Paris, 

1890-92.) 
Dittrich und Spirk : Monumenta Historica Universitatis Pra- 

gensis. (Prague, 1830.) 
Kink : Geschichte der Kaiserl. Univ. zu Wien. (Vienna, 1854.) 
Hautz : Geschichte der Universitiit Heidelberg. (Mannheim, 

1862.) 
Vernulseus : Academia Lovaniensis. (Louvain, 1667.) 
Molanus : Historic Lovaniensium, ed. De Ram. (Brussels, 

1861.) 
Zarncke : Die Statutenbiicher der Univ. Leipzig. (Leipzig, 

1861.) 

Acta Rectorum Univ. Lipsiensis. (Leipzig, 1858.) 

Evidence taken and received by the Scottish Universities 

Commissioners of 1826. (London, 1837.) 
Innes : Fasti Aberdonenses. Spalding Club. (Aberdeen, 1854.) 



